The Lost Naval Papers Part 17

"Now what do I know of Burnham?" muttered Dawson. "The name seems familiar." He rang the bell, asked for an atlas, and studied carefully the coast of Ess.e.x. Burnham stood upon the river Crouch, which Dawson had heard of as a famous resort for motor-boats. His eyes gleamed, and he threw up his head, which had been bent over the map. "The man shall have his leave," murmured he. "But I don't think it will be his mother who is buried."

Just at that moment in came Froissart, looking, as Dawson at once remarked, merry and bright. "It is no wonder," said he, "for see this telegram of which I have just had a copy. It was spotted at once at the Bureau, and the man who despatched it has been shadowed by a police officer." The telegram read, "Coming to-day by South Western.

Meet me this evening at usual place." It was addressed to Burnham-on-Crouch in Ess.e.x.

Dawson picked up the note which he had received and pa.s.sed it to Froissart, who read it slowly. "The same place!" cried he.

"Yes," said Dawson slowly, "the same place, and a famous resort for motor-boats. We have not finished yet, my friend, with the _Intrepid_ and _Terrific_"

CHAPTER XIV

A COFFIN AND AN OWL

Dawson laid the letter and the telegram upon his breakfast-table, and bent his head over them. In a few minutes he had weighed them up, sorted out their relative significance, and spoke. "We have here, Froissart, two distinct people. I am almost sure of that. My man of the dockyard who wants leave to bury his mother in Ess.e.x has not yet received permission from his Chief. He would not therefore be telegraphing about his train. He does not know yet whether he will be permitted to go at all. Your man is quite confident that his movements are in no way restricted. As I read between the lines I judge that my man, who knows the actual truth about the docking and sailing of the battle-cruisers, wants to reach the East Coast, whence he has means of transmitting the priceless news to Germany. Your man is of one of the Towns; he has seen the dummy cruisers ash.o.r.e in the Sound; he believes them to be genuine, and he also wants to transmit the news to his paymasters in Germany, He will be an ordinary German agent. The ident.i.ty of place whither both wish to go is partly a coincidence, and partly explained by its excellence as a jumping-off place for fast motor-boats, which, during these long autumn nights, could race over to and get back again between sunset and dawn. We have coast watchers always about for the very purpose of stopping such lines of communication. You shall accompany your own man, and make sure that he is allowed to get through. If he does not himself cross, arrest him as soon as his boat has gone. If he does go, watch for his return and arrest him, and his boat and all on board, the moment that they return. In any event the boat and its crew must be seized upon return to Ess.e.x. Are you quite clear about what you have to do?"

"Quite," said Froissart. "The spies and their boat must be caught red-handed, but not till after the false news of the mining of the battle-cruisers has been carried to Holland. But how shall we make certain that the sleepless English Navy will not b.u.t.t in and catch the boat at sea before it gets across to Holland. The Narrow Seas swarm with fast patrols."

"I will provide for that. I will write at once for you a letter to the Inspector of police at Burnham, and enclose copies of my credentials from the Admiralty. I will also wire to Lord Jacquetot in private code. You will find on arrival that the responsible naval authorities of the district will be entirely at your service. That motor-boat with the news of the great spoof shall be shepherded across most craftily, but when it comes to return will find that the way of transgressors is very hard. Get ready and be off, Froissart; we depend upon your skill and discretion. Get a good view of your man--the police will point him out--before he boards the train, and then don't let him out of your sight. Take two plain-clothes officers with you. Run no unnecessary risks of being spotted. You are rather easily recognisable with those s.h.i.+ning black eyes and black beard, but no one here has seen you officially, and you should pa.s.s unsuspected as a Scotland Yard man.

Can I trust you?"

"_Mais certainement_," said Froissart crossly. "This is simple police work, which I have done a thousand times. I could do it on my head."

"Your train leaves at 10.8; the South Western station. I will give you the letters at once, and then you can start."

Within a quarter of an hour Dawson--his breakfast forgotten--had given Froissart his letters, sent a long telegram by special messenger to the Commander-in-Chief for despatch in code to Jacquetot. Not even to Dawson would the Admiralty entrust its private cypher. Then, as soon as Froissart had disappeared, he called up the Chief of the Dockyard on the telephone and arranged to come at once to his office.

"I had given the easy job to Froissart," he explained to me long afterwards. "It was, as he called it, simple police work. He had, without arousing suspicion, to make smooth the path for his spy just as you and I opened the door to the Hook for the late-lamented Hagan, and escorted him across in the mail-boat. We have helped false news over to the Germans scores of times. It is grand sport. My job was something much more tricky. I had to get plain proof that my man was a spy in the dockyard, to keep him playing on my line to the very last minute, but to make dead certain of stopping him at the fifty-fifth second of the eleventh hour."

"Why did you not cut out your difficulties by just stopping him from going to Ess.e.x? At a word from you his Chief would have refused leave."

Dawson smiled at me in a fas.h.i.+on which I find intensely aggravating.

He has no tact; when he feels superior, he lets one see it plainly.

"The fat would have been in the fire then," exclaimed he. "Suppose he lay low for a day or two, took French leave, and went. I should have been off his track. Shadowing is all very well, but it does not always succeed in a crowded district like the Three Towns. If he had got away without me beside him, the man might have reached Ess.e.x and done there what he pleased. Besides, he might have had accomplices unknown to me.

No, it was the only possible course to give him leave and follow him up close. Then whatever he did would be under my own eye."

Dawson gulped down a cup of coffee, sadly regarded his rapidly congealing bacon, and skipped off to the dockyard. "Who is this man of yours whose mother has died at so very inconvenient a moment for us?

What the deuce is he doing with a mother in Ess.e.x at all? He ought to be a Devon man."

"He isn't, anyway. I have been making close inquiries. Though he has been with us for sixteen years, he did come originally from somewhere in the East. The man is one of the best I have--never drinks, keeps good time, and works hard. He makes big wages, and carries them virtuously home to his wife. He has money in the savings bank, and holds Consols, poor chap, on which he must have wasted the good toil of years. I can't imagine any one less likely to take German gold than this man Maynard. Sure you haven't a bee in your bonnet, Dawson? To a police officer every one is a probable criminal, but some of us now and then are pa.s.sably honest. I will bet my commission that Maynard is honest."

Dawson sniffed. "The honest men, with the excellent characters and the virtuous wives, are always the most dangerous because least likely to arouse suspicion. How do you know that Maynard hasn't a second establishment hidden away somewhere in the Three Towns? The upper and middle cla.s.ses have no monopoly in illicit love affairs. Their working cla.s.s betters do a bit that way too."

"All right. Have it your own way. We will a.s.sume for the sake of security that Maynard is a spy, that he has no dead mother whom he wants leave to bury, and that he has sold his country for the sake of some bit of fluff in Plymouth. The point is: what am I to do? Shall I grant leave?"

"Yes," said Dawson, "and do it handsomely. Give him four days and run the sympathetic stunt. Offer him a Service pa.s.s by the Great Western.

Say how grieved you are and all the rest of the tosh. Have him up now, and put me somewhere close so that I can take a good look at the swine when he comes in and when he goes out."

The Chief of the Dockyards shrugged his shoulders, placed Dawson in an adjoining room, and summoned Maynard from the yard. The man, who was dressed in the awful dead black of his cla.s.s when a funeral is in prospect, came up, and Dawson got a full sight of him. Maynard was about thirty-five, well set up--for he had served in the Territorials--and looked what he was, a first-rate workman of the best type. Even Dawson, who trusted no one, was slightly shaken. "I have never seen a man who looked less like a spy," muttered he; "but then, those always make the most dangerous of spies. Why has he a mother in Ess.e.x, and why has she died just now? Real mothers don't do these things; they've more sense."

Maynard received his third-cla.s.s pa.s.s, respectfully thanked his Officer for his kindly expressed sympathy--which in his case was quite genuine--and disappeared. Dawson jumped into the room again to take a word of farewell. "I should know him anywhere," he cried. "I am going by the same train in the same carriage. Good-bye."

Maynard reached the Great Western station in good time, and found a carriage which was not overcrowded. He was carrying a small handbag.

At the last moment before the train started a prosperous-looking pa.s.senger, with "commercial gentleman" written all over him, stepped into the same compartment and seated himself in a vacant seat opposite the bereaved workman. It was Dawson in one of his favourite roles.

"There is nothing less like a detective," he would say, "than a middle-aged commercial traveller. They are such genial, unsuspicious, open-handed folk. This comes of wandering about the country at other people's expense."

The 10.15 fast express from the Three Towns to Paddington is an excellent one, and the journey was not more tedious than five hours spent in a train are bound to be. All through the journey Dawson, from behind his stock of papers and magazines, studied Maynard, and became, not, perhaps shaken in his conviction, but certainly puzzled. "He looked," he explained to me, "like a sick and sorrowful man. One who had really lost a beloved mother far away would look just like that.

But so might one who had been unfaithful to a trusting wife and was now risking his neck to pour gold into the greedy lap of a frowsy mistress. One must never judge by appearances. A man may look as sick over backing the wrong horse as at losing an only son in the trenches.

Human means of expression are limited."

"It takes time to learn that you are not such a beast as you pretend,"

I observed. Dawson grinned.

At Paddington Maynard took the Tube to Liverpool Street, and did not observe that his fellow pa.s.senger of the brown tweed suit and the fat, self-satisfied, rather oily face followed by the same route. Dawson, who was famished, rejoiced to see Maynard make for the refreshment-room. He could not lunch on the train, since the workman, upon whom he attended, had economically fed himself upon sandwiches put up in a "nosebag."

"No breakfast, no lunch," groaned Dawson. "What a day!" He did his best during five minutes in the refreshment-room at Liverpool Street to fill up the howling void in his person, and then watched Maynard enter a train for Burnham-on-Crouch. In two minutes he had opened up communications with a station Inspector of Police, made himself known, and secured the services of a constable to travel in Maynard's carriage. He did not wish to be seen again himself just at present. He yearned, too, for a first-cla.s.s compartment and an ample tea-basket.

Dawson's brain is a martyr to duty, but his stomach continually rises in rebellion. It was a fast train which would not stop until the Ess.e.x coast was reached, so that Dawson did not doubt that his quarry would be upon the platform when he himself got out So he was, and so, too, was a girl in deep mourning who had come to meet him. Dawson was staggered; a girl, also in funeral blacks, upset the picture which he had painted to himself. The man and girl talked together for a few minutes, and then walked slowly arm in arm out of the station towards the village. Dawson picked up his police a.s.sistant and followed. He gave no explanation of the reasons for his shadowing of the man Maynard, for he was just beginning to feel uneasy. Slowly the party of four threaded through the pretty little place, bright under the pleasant autumn twilight. Maynard and the girl were in front, Dawson and his policeman followed some fifty yards behind. In a side street, at the door of a small cottage--one of a humble row--the pair of mourners stopped, opened the iron gate, and entered. Dawson waited, watching. He could see through the windows into a little parlour where some half a dozen people, all in deep black, were gathered. Presently, as if they had waited only for the arrival of Maynard--which indeed was the fact--the heavy steps of men clumping down wooden stairs resounded from the open door, and there emerged into the street a coffin borne upon the shoulders of six bearers. The moment that the coffin appeared Dawson realised his blunder. Maynard had really lost his mother, and, like a dutiful son, had come all the way from the Three Towns to bury her! Off flew Dawson's hat, and he nudged the policeman hard in the ribs. "Take off your helmet, you chump," he growled savagely. "Don't you see that it's a funeral." The man, rather dazed--he had been plucked away from Liverpool Street at a moment's notice and sent upon what he thought was police service--did what he was told. The group of mourners formed behind the coffin, which was carried to the cemetery not far off. Still following, with their heads bowed, Dawson and the bewildered policeman attended the funeral, heard the beautiful service read, and the last offices completed. Then they turned away and made for the railway station.

"Why, sir," asked the policeman, looking sideways rather fearfully at his superior officer's stern face--"why, sir, did we come to this place?"

"Why? Haven't you seen?" snapped Dawson. "To attend a funeral, of course."

I have never met that policeman. To have conversed with him and to have sought to chop a way through the tangled recesses of his mind would have gratified me hugely. For, if police constables think at all, in what a bewildered whirl of confused speculation must his poor brain have been occupied during the return journey to London! Dawson tossed him into a compartment of the first train which came along, one of extreme slowness, and then dismissed him into cold s.p.a.ce without a sc.r.a.p of remorse. The humble creature, discharging his station duties with the precision of daily habit, had swung into the overpowering orbit of Chief Inspector Dawson, been caught up, dumped without instructions upon an unknown journey in attendance upon an unknown workman. Then when the train had stopped, he had been spewed out upon a strange country platform, led through strange mean streets, and forced with head bared to the autumn chill of evening, to attend the obsequies of a total stranger. At the end, without a word of explanation, still less of apology, he had been returned as an empty rejected package to the platform at Liverpool Street. Yes, I should dearly love to have met and cross-questioned that policeman, and have listened to the bizarre solution which he had to offer to it all. But most probably, in his stolid, faithful way, he never gave the subject any thought at all. To be tossed about at the whims of superiors was an experience which he would take as composedly as he would those exiguous weekly wages which were the derisory compensation.

Dawson went to the small hotel which he had picked out with Froissart as a convenient rendezvous. There he sat for hours doing nothing, for he was far too wise a man to push his head into another man's business, even though that one were a subordinate and a foreigner. He had failed once; he could not afford, by deputy, to fail a second time. Besides, he knew nothing of the movements of Froissart and his quarry. They had not appeared within the visible horizon of Burnham-on-Crouch, though they had had ample time in which to arrive.

I am afraid that his temper got the better of him, and as the night drew on, unsolaced by a word from Froissart, and unrelieved by any literature more engrossing than old railway time-tables and hotel advertis.e.m.e.nts, he consigned to the Bottomless Pit the Chief of the Devonport Dockyard, the disgustingly virtuous and unenterprising Maynard, and even the harmless soul of his lately buried mother.

Dawson in a royal rage is no pleasant spectacle.

It had gone half-past eleven before Froissart came, a boisterous, triumphant Froissart, bragging of his skill and his success in the manner of a born Gascon.

"It was tremendous, _mon ami_," roared Froissart, unchecked by Dawson's scowls. "I have done the blooming trick: the boat has gone to Holland, and the filthy spy is in the strong lock-up. My vigilance, my astuteness, my resource unfathomable, my flair, my soul of an artist, my patience inexhaustible, my address so firm and yet so delicate, my mastery of the minds of those others less gifted, my--"

"Oh, stow it!" roared Dawson.

"Unfailing insight, _mon esprit francais_, my genius for the service of police, my unshakable courage and elan, have had their just and inevitable reward. The boat with the message so false has gone to Holland for the German Kaiser to gloat over, and the filthy spy is in the safe lock-up. I took him with my own hands--I, le Comte de Froissart, I bemired my hands by contact with his foul carcase. The boat it flew down the river; _ma foi_, like a flash of the lightning, going they said thirty knots, _presque cinquante kilometres par heure_. The glorious _Marine Anglaise_ will see that it reaches les Pays Bas, and then when it is of return your sailors so splendid, with sang-froid so perfect, will gobble it up. Just gobble it up. As I will gobble up this cold beef upon your table. _Peste_, I am of a hunger excruciating. I have not eaten for five, six, ten hours."

Froissart sat down at Dawson's table, where still lay the cold remains of his supper--he had had the decency to reflect that his colleague Froissart might be hungry upon arrival--and fell to eating copiously and loudly. The French are least admirable when they are seen devouring food.

Froissart ate while Dawson writhed. Though his colleague's success would plant laurels upon his own brow--little would he ever say at the Yard of that journey to Burnham and the preposterous funeral--he was jealous, bitterly jealous. I am by special appointment the Boswell of Dawson, yet I do not spare the feelings of my subject. Rather do I go over them with a rake--for the ultimate good of Dawson's variegated soul. He was bitterly jealous, but from natural curiosity yearned to know the details of those feats of which Froissart prated so triumphantly. And all the while, unconscious, heedless of his wrathful exasperated chieftain, Froissart devoured food in immense quant.i.ties.

It was a disgusting exhibition.

Satisfied at last, Froissart broke away from the table, lit a cigarette, and sat himself down beside Dawson before the fire. It was well past midnight, but to these men regular habits were unknown, and the hours of work and of sleep always indeterminate.