Mr. Zero Read online

  Algy hesitated, and risked a question.

  “Was the memorandum very important?”

  Mr. Lushington drummed on the arm of his chair.

  “Oh, the skies won’t fall. There have been, as you know, a certain number of acts of sabotage. There have been allusions in the Press, and there have been questions in the House. There has been some uneasiness, and a general tightening up of precautionary measures. Then the Foreign Office Intelligence came along with the theory of an organization directed from abroad and with very wide ramifications.” He paused. Algy was aware of scrutiny.

  Mr. Lushington went on speaking.

  “Colonel Garratt is convinced that such an organization exists. He believes that it has plans for sabotage on a large scale. If this country were faced with a sudden emergency, these plans would be brought into operation. He has compiled a list of suspected agents, and was very anxious that I should sanction a general round up. I wished to think the matter over, and asked to be furnished with a memorandum and a list of the suspected persons before the week-end. The envelope delivered to Carstairs contained this information. It came from Colonel Garratt through our own people, and I am not excluding the possibility of a leakage, but it is sufficiently obvious that there would have been no need to steal the papers if the information had already been obtained from either of the departments concerned. When I say that the messenger is above suspicion, I have regard not only to his character and length of service, but to the fact that it is incredible that he would have risked substituting a blank envelope for the one addressed to me, when all that he had to do was to allow the enclosures to be copied or photographed. He could not possibly have anticipated that neither Carstairs, nor you, nor I myself would not immediately examine the envelope and detect the fraud. Now, Algy, I am coming to the point. The papers were stolen a week ago. I am advised that a raid would not be likely to produce sufficient evidence to justify itself. Whoever had an interest in acquiring the papers has therefore probably achieved his end. He has found out which of his agents are under suspicion. He has been able to warn them, and he will probably now replace them by others. We shall have to begin all over again. As I said before, the skies won’t fall, but what matters to me is the suggestion that the papers were stolen here in my own house.”

  Algy felt exactly as if someone had poured about half a pint of cold water down the back of his neck, because-well, after all-hang it all-what was Monty saying?

  He said aloud, “Yes, sir?” and was rather proud of the fact that the words came out in quite an ordinary tone.

  “It has been suggested to me-” this was Monty on the high horse of offence-“it has been suggested that it would have been far more credible that an attempt to steal the papers should be made here, where the fact that I was expecting them was known, and their nature if not known was at least guessed at, rather than at Wellings, where no one could reasonably be supposed to have any information on the subject.”

  Algy had been thinking. His thoughts made a clear and very unpleasant pattern. He wanted to get up, to shout out the fury and anger which filled him. But he did not do either of these things. He sat quite still, and he said quietly,

  “That puts it on me.”

  “That is why I am talking to you like this,” said Montagu Lushington. “When you say that this puts it on you, you are perhaps exaggerating. Four people handled the envelope in this house-”

  “Four?”

  Mr. Lushington inclined his head.

  “The messenger-Carstairs-you, Algy-and I. The messenger really is above suspicion. Our own people swear to him. There remain Carstairs, whom I am prepared to swear to, and you, Algy, and myself. If I could remember reading the address upon the envelope I should be able to clear you, and in doing so I should prove, no doubt to some people’s satisfaction, that I had abstracted the papers myself.”

  Algy looked across the table. His pleasant face had taken on the most unwontedly stern expression. He looked as he would not look, except under stress, for a dozen years at least. He said, still in that quiet voice,

  “It does come back to me, you see. Do I have to say that I didn’t do it, sir?”

  He got the shrewd look again. Montagu Lushington said,

  “Not to me, Algy.”

  VIII

  Algy Somers was dining out. He was dining with the Giles Westgates. Giles was his very good friend, and Linda was a cousin-one of the many cousins who bloomed, sprouted, and climbed on a highly prolific family tree. Linda and Giles knew everyone, went everywhere, and did everything. They probably knew all about the papers that had gone missing at the Wessex-Gardners’-the “all” not to be read to include criminal knowledge, but merely an expert collection of every scrap of fact and gossip on the subject. This being so, Algy had serious thoughts of getting the man at his rooms to ring up and say that he was dead. No lesser excuse would be any good, and Barker would do it awfully well-“Mr. Somers’ compliments, and he is very sorry indeed to inconvenience your table, madam, but he is unavoidably prevented from joining you tonight owing to his sudden decease.” The dark melancholy of Barker’s voice was made for messages like this, and wasted, lamentably wasted, on orders for groceries and fish.

  Algy turned on his bath, and reflected that this was one of the most unpleasant days he had ever spent. The fog outside was nothing to the fog within. In this fog of suspicion, which didn’t amount to accusation and would never amount to accusation, he had endured the long humiliating hours of a long humiliating day. He brought himself to realize that the future now promised an indefinite number of similar days. The Home Secretary had asked for an important memorandum on sabotage, and it had gone missing. Algy Somers was the person who had had by far the best opportunity of taking it. This was a quite insane, quite incontrovertible proposition. And there they were. And there he was. There was no evidence of course. Nobody would quite accuse him, nobody would quite believe him. There would be a whisper that would pursue him wherever he went and whatever he did. It would be prefaced by a vague “They say,” or a hearty “Of course, I don’t believe it, but-” and it would slide by insidious degrees from damaging into damning him. And only twenty-four hours ago he had been trying hard to remember that a young man with the ball at his foot had better put off thinking about marriage for another half dozen years or so. Well, there was no ball at his foot now, and nothing to offer Gay Hardwicke or any other girl. Monty would stand by him-Monty had behaved uncommon well-but the fact that he was a relation put them both in an awkward position. It would have been much easier, for instance, for Monty to stand up for Brewster.

  Algy got into his bath, and considered with bitterness that Brewster had all the luck. Why couldn’t it have been Brewster who had been told off to take that damnable envelope up to Monty? A bit hard on Brewster perhaps, but on the other hand imagination really boggled at the idea of anyone suspecting Brewster. He tried to picture him under suspicion and failed. Brewster was the perfect assistant secretary, the industrious apprentice, the human encyclopedia. No good bothering about Brewster. This was the affair Algy Somers. What was Algy Somers going to do about it? See his good name and his prospects die a slow death from poison? Well then, what about it? The answer came to him vigorous and clear-“I’ve damn well got to find out who took those papers.”

  He ceased to lie supine in the gratifyingly hot water. You didn’t expose villainy by lying in a hot bath-you girded yourself for the fray, and you went out and looked for the fellow who had really done the deed.

  Algy proceeded to gird himself. He didn’t know where he was going to look, but it occurred to him that Linda’s dinner table wasn’t at all a bad place to begin, because what he wanted to do was to listen to the voice of scandal. About the Wessex-Gardners, and the Wessex-Gardners’ house-party.

  He ran through the guests in his own mind. Monty had been a bit stiff over telling him about them, but had stood and delivered like a man in the end.

  Beaufort and Poppy Wessex-Gardner. The
host and hostess. He was the little man with the bald head at the Ducks and Drakes. Insignificant physically and no use socially, but a bulging forehead and probably a great brain. Anyhow he had made masses of money, and was now going to build aeroplanes for the government. They called him Buffo. Sabotage might interest him. Poppy? Amazing clothes, bizarre make-up, moderate personal attractions, age very difficult to tell-somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Nothing to suggest whether she was or could be interested in anything or anyone except herself.

  Another lot of Wessex-Gardners. Bingham and Constance. Man known as Binks. In business with his brother, but definitely a lesser light. Very good bridge-player. Constance -Maud Lushington’s sister. Vague recollections of having met her-vague recollections of her being even more like a horse than Maud. It didn’t seem possible, but the equine impression very strong.

  Francis Colesborough and the lovely Sylvia. A peach of peaches. Quite, quite negligible in the affair Algy Somers. She wouldn’t even know what sabotage was, bless her.

  He turned reluctantly to a less radiant image. Francis Colesborough. Very well set up, very well preserved. One of your forceful, industry-building fellows. Second generation of self-made family-timber, steel. Lots of irons in the fire. Lots of money. Easy, pleasant, reasonably good at all the things people are good at. Highly efficient, and full of government contracts. Just a trifle aloof.

  Monty and Maud. Irreverence toyed with a fantasy of Maud abstracting Monty’s papers. Algy had no deep affection for his cousin Maud by marriage-too much nose; too much upper lip; too many teeth; far, far too many bony ridges in front. Ungrateful of Algy, because Maud had quite an affection for him and always spoke of him as “my husband’s young cousin.” He sometimes wondered what would happen when he passed the thirty mark, and the thirty-five, and the forty. Would he become “my husband’s middle-aged cousin”-and at what moment? Digressions apart, Monty and Maud were off the map. What remained not promising at all. Buffo, Poppy, Binks, Constance, Francis Colesborough, and the lovely Sylvia. It was really extremely difficult to imagine any of them pinching a government memorandum out of Monty’s despatch-case with Monty next door having a bath. Worse than difficult-farcical. Well, when there are no probables you must take a possible, and if there aren’t any possibles, you must work through the improbables, and may even end up with an impossible.

  He stood frowning into the glass as he dealt with his tie. He was good at ties, and it came out well. Faint memories of some historic character who took particular pains over a toilet for the scaffold flitted through the hinterland of his mind. They were presently supplemented by the refrain of a ballad about the gentleman called Gilderoy:

  “Sae rantingly, sae wantonly.

  Sae dauntingly gae’d he.

  He played a spring and danced it round

  Beneath the gallows tree.”

  – the sort of thing that would come into your head at this sort of moment.

  He buttoned his waistcoat and slipped his arms into his coat. With his hands at the lapels he surveyed the result. Not too bad. “Sae rantingly, sae wantonly-” There was the dashed thing again, and he couldn’t even remember how he came to know it. He turned, and was aware of the light glancing oddly across the tail of his coat. The excellent Barker had furnished the room with a nice fumed oak suite. The wardrobe sported a long strip of mirror glass upon its door. Algy was always afraid that the weight of it would bring the whole thing over, but for the moment it stood firm. The glass showed a bulge in the left-hand tail where no bulge should be-something in the pocket. But there oughtn’t to be anything in the pocket. He would never dream of putting anything there. People did of course-the cigarette-case. He knew a man who harboured a handkerchief-a most slovenly habit. But this wasn’t a cigarette-case, and it certainly wasn’t a handkerchief. It was stiff, and it crackled-paper-thickish paper. He drew it out, and beheld a manila envelope doubled up, folded neatly. He unfolded it, laid it flat. It was an official envelope, and it bore an official address:

  The Rt. Hon’ble. Montagu Lushington.

  The words dazzled, the words swam before Algy’s horrified eyes. Because he had handled this envelope before. He had taken it from Carstairs at the study door and gone up to Monty’s room and put it down on Monty’s dressing-table. He hadn’t looked at the address. He hadn’t consciously looked at the envelope. But now that he had it in his hand again, he knew that he had noticed the blot in the left-hand corner-a round blob of a blot which had dried very thick, and black, and shiny. This was undoubtedly Monty’s envelope-the stolen envelope. And someone had planted it on him. Someone must have planted it on him at the Ducks and Drakes last night.

  He stared at it. Why? Rather crass attempt to deepen suspicion? Or rather subtle attempt to put the wind up him? Other possibilities… Too many possibilities…

  He turned the envelope over, and the flap hung loose. He lifted it and looked inside.

  The envelope was empty.

  IX

  Giles and Linda Westgate lived in a flat which consisted of one large room and several darkish cupboards euphemistically labelled bedroom No. I, bedroom No. 2, kitchen, and bathroom. Linda had done her best by painting each one a different colour and in the brightest possible shade. Her cupboard was a brilliant jade, Giles’ canary-yellow, the bathroom emerald, and the kitchen a cheerful orange. The large room she had left alone. It had cream walls, a parquet floor, and no furniture except piles of cushions, a collapsible table, and a dozen chromium-plated chairs. Their brittle, angular brightness reminded Algy of some insect’s legs-grasshopper, dragonfly, mantis.

  Linda furnished her room with people. There were eight of them for dinner, and a crowd afterwards. She wore scarlet velvet, which went very well with her cream skin and her cream walls. She had black hair which never stayed where it was put, and dancing eyes with a dark, malicious sparkle in them-a vivid creature, decorative and talkative as a parrot and quite as indiscreet. Giles, a budding barrister, talked nearly as much as she did, and could be witty. They had a great many friends, and spared none of them.

  Algy, coming into the room, was aware of a sudden silence which seemed so abnormal in any room of Linda’s as to make him positive that they had been talking about him. If he flinched he contrived not to show it, and in a moment Linda was hanging on his arm and chattering at him.

  “Algy darling, we were talking about you. Didn’t you hear us all stop dead?” (Clever to take the bull by the horns like that.) “Would you like to know what we were saying?”

  Algy said, “Very much.” But he thought he knew already, and he thought that he wouldn’t be very likely to hear the truth, or to like it if he did.

  There were four people there besides the Westgates. Two of them laughed, and two made rather a lamentable failure of an attempt to appear quite easy and comfortable. Algy looked round, said how do you do to the friend of Linda’s who had been asked to balance a friend of Giles’-pretty girl with red hair; dark young man with a superiority complex-and to James and Mary Craster, whom he liked. It was James and Mary who had been embarrassed, and the other two who had laughed.

  “And what were you saying about me?” he said, and saw Mary blush and Linda twinkle maliciously.

  “Darling Algy, you are the scandal of the moment. Did you know? Half everybody is saying you’ve sold all Monty’s secrets to the Bolshevists, and that you’re going to be shot at dawn in the Tower-and, darling, if you are, you will see about my having a front seat, won’t you? Because what’s the good of being a relation if it doesn’t give you a pull?”

  Algy laughed.

  “I’ll make a point of it. What are the other half saying?”

  “That you’re as pure as the driven snow,” said Linda. “Algy, darling, do, do please tell us all about it. And if you did sell them, do tell me how, and where, and what you got for them, because I might try and collect something myself-I’m most awfully hard up. If I got Monty in the melting mood, I might get something out of him.”
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  “Not you,” said Giles-“he hates you like sin.”

  “Does he hate sin?” said the dark young man.

  Algy said, “Apparently.” He owed Linda something, and was always ready to pay.

  “Yes, isn’t it a shame?” she said. “And all because someone told him I said that it gave me the jitters to think of ever having another horse’s neck-after meeting Maud, you know. And I adored them before, and someone told Monty, and he’s been dead cuts with me ever since. Not my fault that Maud is the dead spit and image of a mare in the knacker’s yard-now is it? But, Algy my angel, you haven’t confided in us. Did you sell Monty, or didn’t you? And what did you get for it? And are they going to shoot you at dawn?”

  “The sentence has been commuted to an evening with you, my dear. Death by tongue-pricks-a nasty lingering affair. Be kind and get it over. Perhaps Giles will tell me what I am supposed to have done.”

  Fatal for Giles to hesitate, but he did-almost but not quite imperceptibly. Then he came in with a gay,

  “You would be the last to hear about it. It’s the most marvellous tale-all the Cabinet secrets gone down the drain, and your’s the hand that loosed the plug.”

  There was no hesitation about Algy’s laughter. If you didn’t laugh at a thing like this, if you couldn’t laugh at it, then you would go down under it and be dead, and damned, and done for. But Algy had no intention of being done for. He threw back his head and laughed, and it took him all he knew, but quite suddenly in the middle of it there came a strange rushing conviction that he was going to come out on top. He linked his arm with Mary Craster’s and said,

  “Marvellous! Poor Monty-has anyone broken it to him?”

  Linda hung affectionately on his other arm.