The Secret of the Tower/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
THE CAR BEHIND THE TREES
Mr. Percy Bennett, that gentlemanly stranger, was an enemy to delay; both constitutionally and owing to experience, averse from dallying with fortune; to him a bird in his hand was worth a whole aviary on his neighbor’s unrifled premises. He thought that Beaumaroy might levant with the treasure; at any moment that unwelcome, though not unfamiliar, tap on the shoulder, with the words (gratifying under quite other circumstances and from quite different lips) “I want you,” might incapacitate him from prosecuting his enterprise (he expressed this idea in more homely idiom—less Latinized was his language, metaphorical indeed, yet terse); finally he had that healthy distrust of his accomplices which is essential to success in a career of crime; he thought that Sergeant Hooper might not deliver the goods!
Sergeant Hooper demurred; he deprecated inconsiderate haste? let the opportunity be chosen. He had served under Mr. Beaumaroy in France, and (whatever faults Major-General Punnit might find with that officer) preferred that he should be off the premises at the moment when Mr. Bennett and he himself made unauthorized entry thereon. “He’s a hot ‘un in a scrap,” said the Sergeant, sitting in a public house at Sprotsfield on Boxing Day evening, Mr. Bennett and sundry other excursionists from London being present.
“My chauffeur will settle him,” said Mr. Bennett. It may seem odd that Mr. Bennett should have a chauffeur; but he had—or proposed to have—pro hac vice—or ad hoc; for this particular job, in fact. Without a car that stuff at Tower Cottage—somewhere at Tower Cottage—would be difficult to shift.
The Sergeant demurred still, by no means for the sake of saving Beaumaroy’s skin, but still purely for the reason already given; yet he admitted that he could not name any date on which he could guarantee Beaumaroy’s absence from Tower Cottage. “He never leaves the old blighter alone later than eleven o’clock or so, and rarely as late as that.”
“Then any night’s about the same,” said gentleman Bennett; “and now for the scheme, dear N.C.O.!”
Sergeant Hooper despaired of the doors. The house-door might possibly be negotiated, though at the probable cost of arousing the notice of Beaumaroy—and of the old blighter himself. But the door from the parlor into the Tower offered insuperable difficulties. It was always locked; the lock was intricate; he had never so much as seen the key at close quarters and, even had opportunity offered, was quite unpractised in the art of taking impressions of locks—a thing not done with accuracy quite so easily as seems sometimes to be assumed.
“For my own part,” said Mr. Bennett with a nod, “I’ve always inclined to the window. We can negotiate that without any noise to speak of, and it oughtn’t to take us more than a few minutes. Just deal boards, I expect! Perhaps the old gentleman and your pal Beaumaroy—the Sergeant spat—will sleep right through it!”
“If they ain’t in the Tower itself,” suggested the Sergeant gloomily.
“Wherever they may be,” said gentleman Bennett, with a touch of irritability—he was himself a sanguine man and disliked a mind fertile in objections—“I suppose the stuff’s in the Tower, isn’t it?”
“It goes in there, and I’ve never seen it come out, Mr. Bennett.” Here at least a tone of confidence rang in the Sergeant’s voice.
“But where in the Tower, Sergeant?”
“’Ow should I know? I’ve never been in the blooming place.”
“It’s really rather a queer business,” observed Mr. Bennett, allowing himself for a moment, an outside and critical consideration of the matter.
“Damned,” said the Sergeant briefly.
“But, once inside, we’re bound to find it! Then—with the car—it’s in London in forty minutes, and in ten more it’s—where it’s going to be; where that is needn’t worry you, my dear Sergeant.”
“What if we’re seen from the road?” urged the pessimistic Sergeant.
“There’s never a job about which you can’t put those questions. What if Ludendorff had known just what Foch was going to do, Sergeant? At any rate anybody who sees us is two miles either way from a police station—and may be a lot farther if he tries to interfere with us! It’s a hundred to one against anybody being on the road at that time of night; we’ll pray for a dark night and dirty weather—which, so far as I’ve observed, you generally get in this beastly neighborhood.” He leant forward and tapped the Sergeant on the shoulder. “Barring accidents, let’s say this day week; meanwhile, Neddy”—he smiled as he interjected. “Neddy is our chauffeur—Neddy and I will make our little plan of attack.”
“Don’t be too generous! Don’t leave all the V.C. chances to me,” the Sergeant implored.
“Neddy’s fair glutton for ’em! Difficulty is to keep him from murder! And he stands six foot four, and weighs seventeen stone.”
“Ill back him up—from be’ind—company in support,” grinned the Sergeant, considerably comforted by this description of his coadjutor.
“You’ll occupy the station assigned to you, my man,” said Mr. Bennett, with an admirable burlesque of the military manner. “The front is wherever a soldier is ordered to be—a fine saying of Lord Kitchener’s! Remember it, Sergeant!”
“Yes, sir,” said the Sergeant, grinning still.
He found Mr. Bennett on the whole amusing company, though occasionally rather alarming; for instance, there seemed to him to be no particular reason for dragging in Neddy’s predilection for murder; though, of course, a man of his inches and weight might commit murder through some trifling and pardonable miscalculation of force. “Same as if that Captain Naylor hit you!” the Sergeant reflected, as he finished the ample portion of rum with which the conversation had been lightened. He felt pleasantly muzzy, and saw Mr. Bennett’s clean-cut features rather blurred in outline. However, the sandy wig and red mustache which that gentleman wore—in his character as a Boxing Day excursionist—were still salient features even to his eyes. Anybody in the room would have been able to swear to them.
Thus the date of the attack was settled and, if only it had been adhered to, things might have fallen out differently between Doctor Mary and Mr. Beaumaroy. Events would probably have relieved Mary from the necessity of presenting her ultimatum, and she might never have heard that illuminating word “Morocco.” But big Neddy the Shover—as his intimate friends were wont to call him—was a man of pleasure as well as of business; he was not a bloke in an office; he liked an ample Christmas vacation and was now taking one with a party of friends at Brighton—all tip-toppers who did the thing in style and spent their money (which was not their money) lavishly. From the attraction of this company—not composed of gentlemen only—Neddy refused to be separated. Mr. Bennett, who was on thorns at the delay, could take it or leave it at that; in any case the job was, in Neddy’s opinion (which he expressed with that massive but good-humored scorn which is an appanage of very large men), a leap in the dark, a pig in a poke, blind hookey; for who really knew how much of the stuff the old blighter and his pal had contrived to shift down to the Cottage in the old brown bag. Sometimes it looked light, sometimes it looked heavy; sometimes perhaps it was full of bricks!
In this mood Neddy had to be humored, even though gentlemanly Mr. Bennett sat on thorns. The Sergeant repined less at the delay; he liked the pickings which the job brought him much better than the job itself, standing in wholesome dread of Beaumaroy. It was rather with resignation than with joy that he received from Mr. Bennett the news that Neddy had at last named the day that would suit his High Mightiness—Tuesday the 7th of January it was, and, as it chanced, the very day before Beaumaroy was to start for Morocco! More accurately, the attack would be delivered on the actual day of his departure—if he went. For it was timed for one o’clock in the morning, an hour at which the road across the heath might reasonably be expected to be clear of traffic. This was an especially important point, in view of the fact that the window of the Tower faced towards the road and was but four or five yards distant from it.
After a jovial dinner—rather too jovial in Mr. Bennett’s opinion, but that was Neddy’s only fault, he would mix pleasure with business—the two set out in an Overland car. Mr. Bennett—whom, by the way, his big friend Neddy called “Mike,” and not “Percy,” as might have been expected—assumed his sandy wig and red mustache as soon as they were well started; Neddy scorned disguise for the moment, but he had a mask in his pocket. He also had a very nasty little club in the same pocket, whereas Mr. Bennett carried no weapon of offense—merely the tools of his trade, at which he was singularly expert. The friends had worked together before; though Neddy reviled Mike for a coward, and Mike averred with curses, that Neddy would bring them both to the gallows some day, yet they worked well together and had a respect for one another, each allowing for the other’s idiosyncrasies. The true spirit of partnership! On it alone can lasting and honorable success be built.
“Just match-boarding, the Sergeant says it is, does he?” asked Neddy, breaking a long silence, which indeed had lasted until they were across Putney Bridge and climbing the Hill.
“Yes, and rotten at that. It oughtn’t to take two minutes; then there’ll be only the window. Of course we must have a look round first. Then, if the coast’s clear, I’ll nip in and shove something up against the door of the place while you’re following. The Sergeant’s to stay on guard at the door of the house, so that we can’t be taken in the rear. See?”
“Righto!”
“Then—well, we’ve got to find the stuff, and when we’ve found it, you’ve got to carry it, Neddy. Don’t mind if it’s a bit heavy, do you?”
“I don’t want to overstrain myself,” said Neddy jocularly, “but I’ll do my best with it, only hope it’s there!”
“It must be there. Hasn’t got wings, has it? At any rate not till you put it in your pocket, and go out for an evening with the ladies!”
Neddy paid this pleasantry the tribute of a laugh, but he had one more business question to ask:
“Where are we to stow the car? How far off?”
“The Sergeant has picked out a big clump of trees, a hundred yards from the cottage on the Sprotsfield side, and about thirty yards from the road. Pretty clear going to it, bar the bracken—she’ll do it easily. There she’ll lie, snug as you like. As we go by Sprotsfield, the car won’t have to pass the Cottage at all—that’s an advantage—and yet it’s not over far to carry the stuff.”
“Sounds all right,” said Neddy placidly, and with a yawn. “Have a drop?”
“No, I won’t—and I wish you wouldn’t, Neddy. It makes you bad-tempered, and a man doesn’t want to be bad-tempered on these jobs.”
“Take the wheel a second while I have a drop,” said Neddy, just for all the world as if his friend had not spoken. He unscrewed the top of a large flask and took a very considerable “drop.” It was only after he had done this with great deliberation that he observed good-naturedly, “And you go to hell, Mike! It’s dark, ain’t it? That’s a bit of all right.”
He did not speak again till they were near Sprotsfield. “This Beaumaroy—queer name, ain’t it?—he’s a big chap, ain’t he, Mike?”
“Pretty fair, but, Lord love you, a baby beside yourself.”
“Well, now, you told me something the Sergeant said about a man as was (Neddy, unlike his friend, occasionally tripped in his English) really big.”
“Oh, that’s Naylor—Captain Naylor. But he’s not at the cottage; we’re not likely to meet him, praise be!”
“Rather wish we were! I want a little bit of exercise,” said Neddy.
“Well, I don’t know but what Beaumaroy might give you that. The Sergeant’s got tales about him at the war.”
“Oh, blast these soldiers—they ain’t no good.” In what he himself regarded as his spare hours, that is to say, the daytime hours wherein the ordinary man labors, Neddy was a highly skilled craftsman, whose only failing was a tendency to be late in the morning and to fall ill about the festive seasons of the year. He made lenses, and, in spite of the failing, his work had been deemed to be of national importance, as indeed it was. But that did not excuse his prejudice against soldiers.
They passed through the outskirts of Sprotsfield; Mike—to use his more familiar name—had made a thorough exploration of the place, and his directions enabled his chauffeur to avoid the central and populous parts of the town. Then they came out on to the open heath, passed Old Place, and presently—about half a mile from Tower Cottage—found Sergeant Hooper waiting for them by the roadside. It was then hard on midnight—a dark cloudy night, very apt for their purpose. With a nod, but without a word, the Sergeant got into the car, and in cautious whispers directed its course to the shelter of the clump of trees; they reached it after a few hundred yards of smooth road and some thirty of bumping over the heath. It afforded a perfect screen from the road, and on the other side there was only untrodden heath, no path or track being visible near it.
Neddy got out of the car, but he did not forget his faithful flask. He offered it to the Sergeant in token of approval. “Good place, Sergeant,” he said; “does credit to you, as a beginner. Here, mate, hold on, though. It’s evident you ain’t accustomed to liquor glasses!”
“When I sits up so late, I gets a kind of a sinking,” the Sergeant explained apologetically.
Mike flashed a torch on him for a minute; there was a very uncomfortable look in his little squinty eyes. “Sergeant,” he said suavely but gravely, “my friend here relies on you. He’s not a safe man to disappoint.” He shifted the light suddenly on to Neddy, whose proportions seemed to loom out prodigious from the surrounding darkness. “Are you, Neddy?”
“No, I’m a sensitive chap, I am,” said Neddy, smiling. “Don’t you go and hurt my pride in you by any sign of weakness, Sergeant.”
The Sergeant shivered a little. “I’m game. I’ll stick it,” he protested valorously.
“You’d better!” Neddy advised.
“All quiet at the Cottage as you came by?” asked Mike.
“Quiet as the grave, for what I see,” the Sergeant answered.
“All right. Mike, where are them sandwiches? I feel like a bite. One for the Sergeant too! But no more flask—no, you don’t Sergeant! When’ll we start, Mike!”
“In about half-an-hour.”
“Just nice time for a snack—oysters and stout for you, my darling?” said jovial Neddy. Then—with a change of voice—“Just as well that didn’t pass us!”
For the sound of a car came from the road they had just left. It was going in the direction of the Cottage and of Inkston. Captain Alec was taking his betrothed home after a joyful evening of congratulation and welcome.