Towards Zero (Superintendent Battle 5)

“Of course. You and I are Fate. Fate let us meet. Fate brought us together. Do you remember when we met at Cannes and I was going on to Estoril and suddenly, when I got there, the first person I met was lovely Kay! I knew then that it was Fate—and that I couldn’t escape.”

“It wasn’t exactly Fate,” Kay said. “It was me!”

“What do you mean by ‘it was me?’”

“Because it was! You see, I heard you say at Cannes you were going to Estoril, so I set to work on Mums and got her all worked up—and that’s why the first person you saw when you got there was Kay.”

Nevile looked at her with a rather curious expression. He said slowly: “You never told me that before.”

“No, because it wouldn’t have been good for you. It might have made you conceited! But I always have been good at planning. Things don’t happen unless you make them! You call me a nitwit sometimes—but in my own way I’m quite clever. I make things happen. Sometimes I have to plan a long way beforehand.”

“The brainwork must be intense.”

“It’s all very well to laugh.”

Nevile said with a sudden curious bitterness:

“Am I just beginning to understand the woman I’ve married? For Fate—read Kay!”

Kay said:

“You’re not cross, are you, Nevile?”

He said rather absently:

“No—no, of course not. I was just—thinking….”

August 10th

Lord Cornelly, that rich and eccentric peer, was sitting at the monumental desk which was his especial pride and pleasure. It had been designed for him at immense expense and the whole furnishing of the room was subordinated to it. The effect was terrific and only slightly marred by the unavoidable addition of Lord Cornelly himself, an insignificant and rotund little man completely dwarfed by the desk’s magnificence.

Into this scene of City splendour there entered a blonde secretary, also in harmony with the luxury furnishings.

Gliding silently across the floor, she laid a slip of paper before the great man.

Lord Cornelly peered down at it.

“MacWhirter? MacWhirter? Who’s he? Never heard of him. Has he got an appointment?”

The blonde secretary indicated that such was the case.

“MacWhirter, eh? Oh! MacWhirter! That fellow! Of course! Send him in. Send him in at once.”

Lord Cornelly chuckled gleefully. He was in high good-humour.

Throwing himself back in his chair, he stared up into the dour unsmiling face of the man he had summoned to an interview.

“You’re MacWhirter, eh? Angus MacWhirter?”

“That’s my name.”

MacWhirter spoke stiffly, standing erect and unsmiling.

“You were with Herbert Clay? That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Lord Cornelly began to chuckle again.

“I know all about you. Clay got his driving licence endorsed, all because you wouldn’t back him up and swear he was going at twenty miles an hour! Livid about it he was!” The chuckle increased. “Told us all about it in the Savoy Grill. ‘That damned pig-headed Scot!’ That’s what he said! Went on and on. D’you know what I was thinking?”

“I’ve not the least idea.”

MacWhirter’s tone was repressive. Lord Cornelly took no notice. He was enjoying his remembrance of his own reactions.

“I thought to myself: ‘That’s the kind of chap I could do with! Man who can’t be bribed to tell lies.’ You won’t have to tell lies for me. I don’t do my business that way. I go about the world looking for honest men—and there are damned few of them!”

The little peer cackled with shrill laughter, his shrewd monkeylike face wrinkled with mirth. MacWhirter stood solidly, not amused.

Lord Cornelly stopped laughing. His face became shrewd, alert.

“If you want a job MacWhirter, I’ve got one for you.”

“I could do with a job,” said MacWhirter.

“It’s an important job. It’s a job that can only be given to a man with good qualifications—you’ve got those all right—I’ve been into that—and to a man who can be trusted—absolutely.”

Lord Cornelly waited. MacWhirter did not speak.

“Well, man, can I depend upon you absolutely?”

MacWhirter said dryly:

“You’ll not know that from hearing me answer that of course you can.”

Lord Cornelly laughed.

“You’ll do. You’re the man I’ve been looking for. Do you know South America at all?”

He went into details. Half an hour later MacWhirter stood on the pavement, a man who had landed an interesting and extremely well-paid job—and a job that promised a future.

Fate, after having frowned, had chosen to smile upon him. But he was in no mood to smile back. There was no exultation in him, though his sense of humour was grimly tickled when he thought back over the interview. There was a stern poetic justice in the fact that it was his former employer’s diatribes against him that had actually got him his present advancement!

He was a fortunate man, he supposed. Not that he cared! He was willing to address himself to the task of living, not with enthusiasm, not even with pleasure, but in a methodical day after day spirit. Seven months ago, he had attempted to take his own life; chance, and nothing but chance, had intervened, but he was not particularly grateful. True, he felt no present disposition to do away with himself. That phase was over for good. You could not, he admitted, take your life in cold blood. There had to be some extra fillip of despair, of grief, of desperation or of passion. You could not commit suicide merely because you felt that life was a dreary round of uninteresting happenings.

On the whole he was glad that his work would take him out of England. He was to sail for South America the end of September. The next few weeks would be busy getting together certain equipment and being put in touch with the somewhat complicated ramifications of the business.

But there would be a week’s leisure before he left the country. He wondered what he should do with that week? Stay in London? Go away?

An idea stirred nebulously in his brain.

Saltcreek?

“I’ve a damned good mind to go down there,” said MacWhirter to himself.

It would be, he thought, grimly amusing.

August 19th

“And bang goes my holiday,” said Superintendent Battle disgustedly.

Mrs. Battle was disappointed, but long years as the wife of a police officer had prepared her to take disappointments philosophically.

“Oh well,” she said, “it can’t be helped. And I suppose it is an interesting case?”

“Not so that you’d notice it,” said Superintendent Battle. “It’s got the Foreign Office in a twitter—all those tall thin young men rushing about and saying Hush Hush here, there and everywhere. It’ll straighten out easy enough—and we shall save everybody’s face. But it’s not the kind of case I’d put in my Memoirs, supposing I was ever foolish enough to write any.”

“We could put our holiday off, I suppose—” began Mrs. Battle doubtfully, but her husband interrupted her decisively.

“Not a bit of it. You and the girls go off to Britlington—the rooms have been booked since March—pity to waste them. I tell you what I’ll do—go down and spend a week with Jim when this blows over.”

Jim was Superintendent Battle’s nephew, Inspector James Leach.

“Saltington’s quite close to Easterhead Bay and Saltcreek,” he went on. “I can get a bit of sea air and a dip in the briny.”

Mrs. Battle sniffed.

“More likely he’ll rope you in to help him over a case!”

“They don’t have any cases this time of the year—unless it’s a woman who pinches a few sixpennyworths from Woolworth’s. And anyway Jim’s all right—he doesn’t need his wits sharpening for him.”

“Oh well,” said Mrs. Battle. “I suppose it will work out all right, but it is disappointin

g.”

“These things are sent to try us,” Superintendent Battle assured her.

SNOW WHITE AND RED ROSE

I

Thomas Royde found Mary Aldin waiting for him on the platform at Saltington when he got out of the train.

He had only a dim recollection of her, and now that he saw her again he was rather surprisedly aware of pleasure in her brisk capable way of dealing with things.

She called him by his Christian name.

“How nice to see you, Thomas. After all these years.”