The Lost Naval Papers Part 4

"You knew that he was no longer in my service?"

"Yes, I knew."

I might fairly have asked why he had used my name, but refrained. One can readily pardon the lapses of an honest man, terrified at finding himself in the coils of the police, clinging to the good name of his wife and her family, clutching at any device to throw the sleuth-hounds of the law off the real scent. He had given his brother-in-law forbidden information from a loyal desire to help him and with no knowledge of the base use to which it would be put. When detected, he had sought at any cost to s.h.i.+eld him.

"I will do my best to help you," I said.

His head drooped down till it rested upon his bent arms, and he groaned and panted under the torture of tears. His was not the stuff of which criminals are made.

I found Dawson's chuckling joy rather repulsive. I felt that, being successful, he might at least have had the decency to dissemble his satisfaction. He might also have given me some credit for the rapid clearing up of the problem in detection. But he took the whole thing to himself, and gloated like a child over his own cleverness. I neither obtained from him thanks for my a.s.sistance nor apologies for his suspicions. It was Dawson, Dawson, all the time. Yet I found his egotism and unrelieved vanity extraordinarily interesting. As we sat together in his room waiting for the Carlisle train to come in he discoursed freely to me of his triumphs in detection, his wide-spread system of spying upon spies, his long delayed "sport" with some, and his ruthless rapid trapping of others. Men are never so interesting as when they talk shop, and as a talker of shop Dawson was sublime.

"If," said Dawson, as the time approached for the closing scene, "our much-wanted friend has himself handed in the parcel at Carlisle--he would be afraid to trust an accomplice--our job will be done. If not, I will pull a drag net through this place which will bring him up within a day or two. What a fool the man is to think that he could escape the eye of Bill Dawson."

A policeman entered, laid a packet upon the table before us, and announced that the prisoner had been placed in cell No. 2. Dawson sprang up. "We will have a look at him through the peephole, and if it is our man--" One glance was enough. Before me I saw him whom I had expected to see. He and his cargo of whisky bottles had reached the last stage of their long journey; at one end had been peace, reasonable prosperity, and a happy home; at the other was, perhaps, a rope or a bullet.

Dawson began once more to descant upon his own astuteness, but I was too sick at heart to listen. I remembered only the visit years before which that man's wife had paid to me. "Will you not open the parcel?"

I interposed. He fell upon it, exposed its contents of bread, chocolate, and sardine tins, and called for a can opener. He shook the tins one by one beside his ear, and then, selecting that which gave out no "flop" of oil, stripped it open, plunged his fingers inside, and pulled forth a clammy mess of putty and sawdust. In a moment he had come upon a paper which after reading he handed to me. It bore the words in English, "Informant arrested: dare not send more."

"What a fool!" cried Dawson. "As if the evidence against him were not sufficient already he must give us this."

"You will let that poor devil of a draughtsman down easily?" I murmured.

"We want him as a witness," replied Dawson. "t.i.t for tat. If he helps us, we will help him. And now we will cut along to the Admiral. He is eager for news."

We broke in upon the Admiral in his office near the s.h.i.+pyards, and he greeted me with cheerful badinage. "So you are in the hands of the police at last, Copplestone. I always told you what would be the end of your naval inquisitiveness."

Dawson told his story, and the naval officer's keen kindly face grew stern and hard. "Germans I can respect," said he, "even those that pretend to be our friends. But one of our own folk--to sell us like this--ugh! Take the vermin away; Dawson, and stamp upon it."

We stood talking for a few moments, and then Dawson broke in with a question. "I have never understood, Admiral, why you were so very confident that Mr. Copplestone here had no hand in this business. The case against him looked pretty ugly, yet you laughed at it all the time. Why were you so sure?"

The Admiral surveyed Dawson as if he were some strange creature from an unknown world. "Mr. Copplestone is a friend of mine," said he drily.

"Very likely," snapped the detective. "But is a man a white angel because he has the honour to be your friend?"

"A fair retort," commented the Admiral. It happens that I had other and better reasons. For in July I myself showed Mr. Copplestone over the new battles.h.i.+p _Rampagious_, and after our inspection we both lunched with the builders and discussed her design and armament in every detail. So as Mr. Copplestone knew all about her in July, he was not likely to suborn a draughtsman in November. See?"

"You should have told me this before. It was your duty."

"My good Dawson," said the Admiral gently, "you are an excellent officer of police, but even you have a few things yet to learn. I had in my mind to give you a lesson, especially as I owed you some punishment for your impertinence in opening my friend Copplestone's private letters. You have had the lesson; profit by it."

Dawson flushed angrily. "Punishment! Impertinence! This to me!"

"Yes," returned the Admiral stiffly, "beastly impertinence."

CHAPTER IV

SABOTAGE

Dawson showed no malice towards the Admiral or myself for our treatment of him. I do not think that he felt any; he was too fully occupied in collecting the spoils of victory to trouble his head about what a Scribbler or a Salt Horse might think of him. He gathered to himself every sc.r.a.p of credit which the affair could be induced to yield, and received--I admit quite deservedly--the most handsome encomiums from his superiors in office. During the two weeks he pa.s.sed in my city after the capture--weeks occupied in tracing out the threads connecting his wretch of a prisoner with the German agents upon what Dawson called his "little list"--he paid several visits both to my house and my office. His happiness demanded that he should read to me the many letters which poured in from high officials of the C.I.D., from the Chief Commissioner, and on one day--a day of days in the chronicles of Dawson--from the Home Secretary himself. To me it seemed that all these astute potentates knew their Dawson very thoroughly, and lubricated, as it were, with judicious flattery the machinery of his energies. I could not but admire Dawson's truly royal faculty for absorbing b.u.t.ter. The stomachs of most men, really good at their business, would have revolted at the diet which his superiors shovelled into Dawson, but he visibly expanded and blossomed. Yes, Scotland Yard knew its Dawson, and exactly how to stimulate the best that was in him. He never bored me; I enjoyed him too thoroughly.

One day in my club I chanced upon the Admiral.

"Have you met our friend Dawson lately?" I asked.

"Met him?" shouted he, with a roar of laughter. "Met him? He is in my office every day--he almost lives with me; goodness knows when he does his work. He has a pocket full of letters which he has read to me till I know them by heart. If I did not know that he was a first-cla.s.s man I should set him down as a colossal a.s.s. Yet, I rather wish that the Admiralty would sometimes write to me as the severe but very human Scotland Yard does to Dawson."

"Does he ever come to you in disguise?" I asked.

"Not that I know of. I see vast numbers of people; some of them may be Dawson in his various incarnations, but he has not given himself away."

Then I explained to my naval friend my own experience. "He tried," I said, "to play the disguise game on me, and clean bowled me the first time. While he was laughing over my discomfiture I studied his face more closely than a lover does that of his mistress. I tried to penetrate his methods. He never wears a wig or false hair; he is too wise for that folly. Yet he seems able to change his hair from light to dark, to make it lank or curly, short or long. He does it; how I don't know. He alters the shape of his nose, his cheeks, and his chin.

I suppose that he pads them out with little rubber insets. He alters his voice, and his figure, and even his height. He can be stiff and upright like a drilled soldier, or loose-jointed and shambling like a tramp. He is a finished artist, and employs the very simplest means.

He could, I truly believe, deceive his wife or his mother, but he will never again deceive me. I am not a specially observant man; still one can make a shot at most things when driven to it, and I object to being the subject of Dawson's ribaldry. If you will take my tip, you will be able to spot him as readily as I do now."

"Good. I should love to score off Dawson. He is an aggravating beast."

"Study his ears," said I. "He cannot alter their chief characters. The lobes of his ears are not loose, like yours or mine or those of most men and women; his are attached to the back of his cheekbones. My mother had lobes like those, so had the real Roger Tichborne; I noticed Dawson's at once. Also at the top fold of his ears he has rather a p.r.o.nounced blob of flesh. This blob, more prominent in some men than in others, is, I believe, a surviving relic of the sharp point which adorned the ears of our animal ancestors. Dawson's ancestor must have been a wolf or a bloodhound. Whenever now I have a strange caller who is not far too tall or far too short to be Dawson, if a stranger stops me in the street to ask for a direction, if a porter at a station dashes up to help me with my bag, I go for his ears. If the lobes are attached to the cheekbones and there is a p.r.o.nounced blob in the fold at the top, I address the man instantly as Dawson, however impossibly unlike Dawson he may be. I have spotted him twice now since he bowled me out, and he is frightfully savage--especially as I won't tell him how the trick is done. He says that it is my duty to tell him, and that he will compel me under some of his beloved Defence of the Realm Regulations. But the rack could not force me to give away my precious secret. Cherish it and use it. You will not tell, for you love to mystify the ruffian as much as I do."

"I will watch for his ears when he next calls, which, I expect, will be to-morrow. Thank you very much. I won't sneak."

"Remember that nothing else in the way of identification is of any use, for I doubt if either of us has ever seen the real, undisguised Dawson as he is known to G.o.d. We know a man whom we think is the genuine article--but is he? Cary's description of him is most unlike the man whom we see here. I expect that he has a different ident.i.ty for every place which he visits. If he told me that at any moment he was wholly undisguised, I should be quite sure that he was lying. The man wallows in deception for the very sport of the thing. But he can't change his ears. Study them, and you will be safe."

Our club was the only place in which we could be sure that Dawson did not penetrate, though I should not have been surprised to learn that one or two of the waitresses were in his pay. Dawson is an ardent feminist; he says that as secret agents women beat men to a frazzle.

Shortly before Dawson left for his headquarters on the north-east coast he dropped in upon me. He had finished his researches, and revealed the results to me with immense satisfaction.

"I have fixed up Menteith," he began, "and know exactly how he came into communication with the German Secret Service." The contemptuous emphasis which he laid on the word "Secret" would have annoyed the Central Office at Potsdam. I have given the detected British spy the name of Menteith after that of the most famous traitor in Scottish history; if I called him, say, Campbell or Macdonald, nothing could save me from the righteous vengeance of the outraged Clans.

"It was all very simple," he went on, "like most things in my business when one gets to the bottom of them. He was seduced by a man whom the local police have had on their string for a long time, but who will now be put securely away. Menteith was a frequenter of a certain public house down the river, where he posed as an authority on the Navy, and hinted darkly at his stores of hidden information. Our German agent made friends with him, gave him small sums for drinks, and flattered his vanity. It is strange how easily some men are deceived by flattery. The agent got from Menteith one or two bits of news by pretending a disbelief in his sources of intelligence, and then, when the fool had committed himself, threatened to denounce him to the police unless he took service with him altogether. Money, of course, pa.s.sed, but not very much. The Germans who employ spies so extensively pay them extraordinarily little. They treat them like scurvy dogs, for whom any old bone is good enough, and I'm not sure they are not right. They go on the principle that the white trash who will sell their country need only to be paid with kicks and coppers.

Menteith swears that he did not receive more than four pounds for the plans and description of the _Rampagious_. Fancy selling one's country and risking one's neck for four measly pounds sterling! If he had got four thousand, I should have had some respect for him. His home is in a wretched state, and his wife--a pretty woman, though almost a skeleton, and a very nicely mannered, honest woman--says that her husband unexpectedly gave her four pounds a month ago. He had kept none of the blood money for drink! Curious, isn't it?"

"It shows that the man had some good in him. It shows that he was ashamed to use the money upon himself. We must do something for the poor wife, Dawson."

"She will easily get work, and she will be far better without her sot of a husband. She did not cry when I told her everything. 'I ought to have left him long ago,' she said, 'but I tried to save him. Thank G.o.d we have no children,' That seemed to be her most insistent thought, for she repeated it over and over again. 'Thank G.o.d that we have no children.'"

"I hope that you were gentle with her, Dawson," said I, deeply moved.

Long ago the wife had come to me and pleaded for her husband. She had shed no tear; she had admitted the justice, the necessity, of my sentence. "Can you not give him another chance?" she had asked. "No,"

I had answered sadly. "He has exhausted all the chances." When she had risen to go and I had pressed her hand, she had said, still dry-eyed, "You are right, sir, it is no use, no use at all. Thank G.o.d that we have no children."

"I hope that you were gentle with her, Dawson," I repeated.

He astonished me by the suddenness of his explosion. "d.a.m.n," roared he--"d.a.m.n and blast! Do you think that I am a brute. Gentle! It was as much as I could do not to kiss the woman, as your little daughter kissed me, and to promise that I would get her husband off somehow.

But I should not be a friend to her if I tried to save that man."

So Dawson had soft spots in his armour of callousness, and little Jane's instinct was far surer than mine. She had taken to him at sight. When I tried to get from her why, why he had so marked an attraction for her, her replies baffled me more than the central fact.