The Trojan Horse Page 4

  What Schmidt had said was, ‘The clue is cones of runnel.’ Why cones of runnel, I did not know. It had always seemed a bit daft and for that reason, probably, had not fixed itself in my memory. But the essence of the Playfair Code was a key-word or words, and here it was. I wrote down CONES and underneath FRUL, which were the letters in ‘of runnel’ which had not already been given in ‘cones’. Then I added A to that line and continued with the letters of the alphabet that had not already been used, setting them down in blocks of five, leaving out Y, which, I remembered, was regarded as i. This was the result:

  I then jotted down the opening letters of the message in pairs, thus: SD GM ED OL IR BX ON SO VC. Starting at the beginning, I took the rectangle made in the code formed by SD and transposed the vertically opposite letters of the rectangle, getting 10. GM, being in a vertical line, I took the nearest letters to each, making uw, ED made HO, OL made RE, and soon.

  The resulting letters I put down without gaps, and not as they had been in the code. The result was: IOUWHOREADTHESENOT. My excitement was tremendous. Reading Y for i, I found I had got, ‘You who read these not—’

  I then settled down to the job in real earnest, and after half an hour’s steady work I had decoded the whole of that first page. I sat back and read through the result.

  ‘You who read these notes,’ it ran, ‘must decide for yourself whether or not there is sufficient evidence for the matter to be placed in the hands of the authorities. I fear, however, that I shall not live to complete my case.’ That, I remembered, was what he had told me last Monday. ‘I am being watched now and it is only a matter of time. Why did I not go to the authorities myself? I was wanted for murder. If I had gone to them and said the Calboyd Diesel Company is controlled by Germany and the murder was committed by their agents, I should have been considered mad. But day by day I shall add to these notes, and as my inquiries reveal new facts, I shall hope that, by the time this comes into your hands, there will at any rate be sufficient evidence to convince you of my sanity and of the seriousness of the position I have discovered.

  ‘I shall probably have explained to you how I was discredited at the Air Ministry by Calboyds. This should not be difficult to verify. When I tell you that the diesel engine on which I have been working and which has now reached the stage of final tests is a third of the weight of the ordinary diesel and develops nearly twice the power of present engines at five hundred revolutions, you will begin to appreciate its importance in war-time. I can confidently state that whichever side first obtains this engine and produces it on a large scale will have air superiority. These claims were presented to the Air Ministry last July. Calboyds told them I was a crank. They had been trying to get me to reveal the secret of the special alloy and the design. Those who control the company wanted the engine for Germany.

  ‘You will say this is fantastic. But I have heard that in the early summer of this year Britain is going over to diesel engines on a large scale. The Calboyds factories are being extended for this purpose and two shadow factories are being built for the company. They will be the sole producers and the engines will be of their own design. The design is superior to that used in the Heinkels and Dorniers at the present time. But it is definitely inferior to the engines that are being fitted to the latest German bomber and fighter aircraft, which have not yet taken the air. I believe that an order for ten thousand of their diesel engines will be given to Calboyds within the next few months. If that order goes through and Calboyds are allowed to start production Britain will be …’

  I put the paper down. The rest would have to wait till tomorrow when David would have the prints of the remaining pages. But what I had read was enough to set me thinking. The man might be mad, but if Calboyds were really controlled by Germany— It didn’t bear thinking about. One thing I could check up on and that was whether or not Calboyds were to receive a big order for diesel aero engines. Crabshaw of the Ministry of Supply could tell me that. But it was fantastic. Schmidt was right when he had said he would have been considered mad if he had approached the authorities with a story like that. It was too incredible. Old Calboyd was an industrial figurehead. Supposing I told the story to Crisham or wrote to the Prime Minister? They’d think I was going off my head, even though I had led a perfectly blameless life. And why had Llewellin been murdered? It was stupid to frame a man by murdering another.

  I gave it up and went back to bed, putting the photograph and the paper on which I had decoded it in the pocket of my jacket.

  My man woke me as usual at eight. I had a shower and, after a hurried breakfast, took a taxi round to David’s studio. His secretary, Miriam Chandler, opened the door to me. David I found already at work on some stills. ‘Have you got the other prints?’ I asked. I was eager to decode the rest of the message.

  He said, ‘Sorry, you’re a good deal earlier than I expected. The fact is I’ve got to take them all again. I left that negative on the desk over there. I didn’t notice it, but there was a bottle of hydrochloric just by it. I came in this morning to find it tipped on its side. Awful mess. Look at the linoleum there, and the negative of course was completely destroyed. It was that bloody cat, I expect.’ He indicated a shabby tortoisehell curled up placidly on the couch. ‘It keeps the mice down, but it’s always upsetting things in the process. I shan’t be long though. Give him a cigarette, Miriam, and stroke his fevered brow, he looks as though he’s had a bad night. Did you dream of codes and jumbled letters like I did all night?’

  ‘No, I solved it,’ I said triumphantly.

  He swung round from the big sink. ‘You solved it? Well, grand – good for you. How did you get at it?’

  I told him and he cursed me good-humouredly. ‘Why the hell didn’t you say the fellow had said that? May I have a look at it?’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Wait until you’ve got the other prints out and I’ve decoded the rest, then maybe I’ll tell you the whole story.’ I had an idea that his resourcefulness might be an asset if I found it necessary to make further inquiries on my own before handing over to the authorities.

  He said, ‘You’re enough to drive a person crazy.’ Then he went into the big dark-room, taking The Face from the Barbican with him. I had suddenly remembered that I had promised to help him extract money from Calboyds, and I asked Miriam to produce the correspondence. When I had run through it, my mind was made up. Providence isn’t always kind enough to hand things to you on a platter. This would make a good excuse for going up to Oldham and seeing Calboyds for myself.

  David suddenly emerged from the dark-room. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘These pages seem absolutely blank now.’

  I crossed the room and went into the dark-room. The blank pages of the book lay under the light, but there was no fluorescence. They were just blank. He turned to another page. It was blank. ‘Is it the same lamp?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly.’

  I had a sudden sense of uneasiness, the sort of feeling a man has when he has mislaid a Treasury note and knows it was just plain carelessness. I ripped the book from the stand to which it was clamped. The back of it was smeared with mud, but when I ran through the pages, looking for the passage I had marked, I could not find it. After careful searching through the chapter I knew it to be in, I eventually found the passage. But there was no pencil mark against it.

  I turned to David. ‘This isn’t my book,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he replied. ‘It’s got The Face from the Barbican at the top of every page.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not my copy.’ I explained about the pencil marking and showed him the passage.

  ‘Are you certain?’ he asked. ‘You were awfully sleepy last night.’

  ‘Yes, I’m certain all right,’ I said. ‘This isn’t my copy. And that bottle of hydrochloric wasn’t tipped over by the cat. Where did you put the negatives when you went to bed?’ I asked him.

  He frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Where I found them this morning, I think.’
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  ‘And what about the hydrochloric – was that just beside them?’

  He shook his head. ‘Honestly, old boy, I don’t know.’ He went to the door of the dark-room. ‘Miriam,’ he said, ‘can you remember whether that bottle of hydrochloric was on the table there last night?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Depends on whether you used it after I’d gone yesterday. I tidied up as usual and left it on the shelf over there, where it belongs.’

  ‘And I didn’t have it out.’ He swung round on me. ‘No, I didn’t use it last night. You’re right – somebody moved that bottle from the shelf over by the window there and deliberately spilt the contents over those negatives.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  CORNISH PRELUDE

  I knew where I was then. Schmidt’s story, fantastic as it seemed, was true. There was no longer any doubt of that. ‘How did they get in?’ I asked. My voice sounded flat. I was thinking of the four other pages.

  ‘From the roof, I expect,’ said David. ‘If you’re prepared to take a few risks you can get the whole length of the block.’ I followed him out into the passage. He opened the door at the end and climbed rough wooden stairs to another door. He turned the key in the lock and we went out on to the roof. Then he bent down and examined the lock on the outside, and I looked across the rooftops to the dome of the Globe Theatre. The roofs were all joined and an agile man could have come from any one of the buildings in the block.

  ‘I thought so,’ said David. ‘Look!’ I bent down. ‘See that mark where the metal is bright, on the inside edge of the keyhole? That’s where our friend’s pincers scraped as he grasped the end of the key and turned it.’ He straightened up. ‘I expect he came by way of that house with the tall chimneys. It’s a brothel. They had a burglary next door a few months back and the police sergeant told me that the burglars probably got on to the roof that way. They couldn’t prove anything, of course. The girls aren’t going to split. An extra quid or two comes in handy with nothing to do for it but let a fellow on to the roof. Come on, let’s go down, and then perhaps you’ll tell me something about this business.’

  When we reached the corridor I said, ‘Do you mind if we go into your room?’ I had decided to tell him the whole story. I had to have someone to argue it out with. For answer he pushed open the door. ‘Make yourself comfortable,’ he said. ‘I’ll just tell Miriam to hold the fort.’ He was back in a moment with two tankards of beer. ‘Now,’ he said, as he subsided into an easy-chair and began to fill a big curved briar, ‘I hope you’re going to play ball. Can I see the results of your midnight labours, or is that a deadly secret?’

  I said, ‘I think we’d better take things in their proper order.’ Then I told him how Schmidt had come to see me on Monday of the previous week and how he had pushed his way into my office just as I was refreshing my memory about the facts of the case. As I sat there, drinking beer and looking out across the chimney pots of Soho, I saw once again that elderly, tired-faced Jew, sitting opposite me across my desk, with the firelight flickering on his lined face. And I heard once again his quiet voice telling me his story.

  I told it to David just as he had told it to me. ‘My father’s name was Frederick Smith,’ he had begun. ‘Both he and my mother were English – he was a Jew, you understand. Shortly after their marriage, my father went to Austria as an agent for the Western Aluminium and Metal Alloy Company. I was born in Vienna in the winter of 1882. Soon afterwards my father, having bought an interest in a local metal concern, decided to establish himself in Vienna and was naturalised. He became Frederick Schmidt and I, who had been given the name Frank at birth, became, as I am now, Franz Schmidt. My father grew to be quite a big man in the metal business and this influenced me to make engineering my career. After my apprenticeship, I entered my father’s business. In the eight years before 1914, I was responsible for the discovery of several durable alloys and travelled all over the world for the group. I spent nearly a year in England, where I met a Welsh girl, and though she was not of my race I married her. I remember my father was furious when he heard, but she was lovely and gay and irresistible. She died four years ago. We had one child, a girl. She was born in 1913. Then came the war. My father sold the business and went to live in Italy in the days when Italy was still neutral. The war was a great blow to him. He died two years later.

  ‘When the war was over Olwyn and I went back to Vienna. Metal companies were in a terrible state. I bought a good sound business dirt cheap and for four weary years tried to build it up. But it was no good. I had not my father’s business acumen and conditions were against me. After losing practically all the money he had left me, I sold the business for what the buildings and plant would fetch. There followed a very difficult period. You know what Vienna was like after the war, and I hadn’t the means to move. But in 1924 I obtained a post at the Metallurgical Institute. The use of a laboratory enabled me to resume my experiments in durable alloys. Within a year I had discovered a hard steel alloy. I sold it to the Fritz Thessen group. They became interested in my experiments and made me free of their laboratories at the M. V. Industriegesellschaft works on the outskirts of Vienna. Then followed the happiest years of my life. I had the work I loved. And I had my family – little Freya was growing up. Vienna, too, was becoming gay again. We never lacked for money. I discovered new alloys and developed them for use in the production, first of car engines, and then of aircraft engines. I spent much time on the diesel engine. That is important for what follows. I was engrossed in my work and left all my business arrangements to an old friend of mine on the Bourse. Politics did not interest me. I lived in a world of my own into which few outside events penetrated. The outside world was of little importance beside my experiments.’

  He had been staring into the fire and he suddenly turned to me, his face haggard with memories. ‘Have you ever lived in a world of your own?’ he asked. Then he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Of course you haven’t. You’re a practical man. A world of your own is all right until that outside world breaks in upon it. Then—’ He spread his hands with a lift of the shoulders. ‘I had had ample warning, but I was too engrossed. There was the Dolfuss murder. And shortly after that, my broker friend called me down to his office and persuaded me to let him place some of my money in England. I knew, of course, that my countrymen were having a difficult time in Germany, but I shrugged my shoulders and said I thought it was unnecessary. And I went back to my work, and the gathering stormclouds passed me by as I pressed forward with experiments on the diesel engine, in which I had become absorbed.

  ‘Freya was my one interest outside my work. She had passed through the university, a brilliant mathematician with a bent for scientific research. I sent her on to Berlin to continue her studies. Three months later she wrote to me from London, saying she had become the disciple of Professor Greenbaum at the London University. I thought nothing of it at the time. I have never questioned her as to the real reason why she left Berlin. But two months later, in December, 1936, I went home to find my wife had not returned from a shopping expedition. I rang my friends, the hospitals, and finally the police. I walked the streets, frantic. I can remember that night so well. How I reviled myself for my neglect of her! She had reached a difficult age, yet she never reproached me because my work came first, always.’

  He became silent for a moment. The room had been getting dark and the firelight flickered on his face, accentuating the deep lines of his forehead and the stubble on his chin. ‘I hurried from street to street, streets that had been familiar from my boyhood’s days, streets that I had shown proudly to her when I had brought her back to the little house in Grinzingerallee. I questioned countless strangers and every policeman I met, and I resolved to devote less time to my work and more to making her happy, to recapturing the lost spirit of our youth. But my resolutions were useless.’ He sighed. ‘I returned home in the early hours of the morning, and a little after six the Bürgerspital phoned me to say that she had been brought in by
the police suffering from exposure. When I reached her she was delirious, and in the babble of her delirium I learned that she had been assaulted by a band of Nazis. They had taunted her with being the wife of a Jew. She – she had compared my work with theirs, and one of them had struck her down for daring to uphold science as a greater art than Jew-baiting. Apparently they had feared to leave her there in the street, for the police had found her lying in the backyard of a big apartment house. I stayed by her bedside and learned how this taunting had become an almost daily occurrence. She had never mentioned it to me. She died that night. Double pneumonia was the cause.’

  Again he became silent for a moment. Then he turned to me and said, ‘I’m sorry – you must be wondering when I am coming to the point. But I want you to understand, so that you will believe what I am telling you.’

  I said, ‘Please go on,’ It had eased him to tell me the story, and the insight it gave me into the development of the man’s character fascinated me. I pushed my cigarette-case across the desk. He took one automatically. I lit it for him, and he sat there for a moment puffing at it nervously.

  ‘At that time, it seemed that nothing more could touch me,’ he went on. ‘Yet it was but the beginning.’ He tossed the cigarette into the fire. His voice was quite toneless as he said, ‘I went back to my work with the zest of one who wants to forget. But I was sensitive now to the atmosphere that surrounded me. I was conscious of the growing contempt for my race. I persuaded Freya to stay on in England. She broke the news of Olwyn’s death to her family in Swansea and stayed with them for several weeks, writing enthusiastically of their kindness. Then suddenly the M. V. Industriegesellschaft informed me that I could no longer have the use of their laboratories. I was not altogether sorry. Sneers were no longer veiled. From that moment I received no more royalties from the group.