Desmond laughed ruefully to himself. Indeed, he mused, things looked that way. What would the Chief say if he could see his prize young man, his white-headed boy, sitting sentimentalizing by the fire over a woman who was, by her own confession, practically an accredited German agent? Desmond thrust his chin out and shook himself together. He would put the feminine side of Nur-el-Din out of his head. He must think of her henceforth only as a member of the band that was spotting targets for those sneaking, callous brutes of U-boat commanders.

He went back to the study of the list of Mr. Bellward's friends.

But he found it impossible to focus his mind upon it. Do what he would, he could not rid himself of the sensation that he had failed at the very outset of his mission. He was, indeed, he told himself, the veriest tyro at the game. Here he had had under his hand in turn Nur-el-Din and Mortimer (who, he made no doubt, was the leader of the gang which was so sorely troubling the Chief), and he had let both get away without eliciting from either even as much as their address. By the use of a little tact, he had counted on penetrating something of the mystery enveloping the dancer and her relationship with the gang; for he thought he divined that Nur-el-Din was inclined to make him her confidant.

With the information thus procured, he had hoped to get on to the track of the leader of the band.

But that ugly brute; Mortimer, with his goggle eyes, had spoiled everything. His appearance had taken Desmond completely by surprise: to tell the truth, it had thrown our young man rather off his guard. "If only I might have had a little longer acquaintance with my part," he reflected bitterly as he sat by the fire, "I should have been better able to deal with that pompous a.s.s!"

Afterwards, when thinking over the opening events of this extraordinary episode of his career, Desmond rather wondered why he had not followed Mortimer out of the house that afternoon and tracked him down to his hiding place. But, as a matter of fact, the idea did not occur to him at the time. His orders were positive not to leave the house, and he never even thought of breaking them--at any rate, not then.

His orders, also, it is true, were to report to headquarters any communication that might be made to him; but these instructions, at least as far as Nur-el-Din's and Mortimer's visits were concerned, he resolved to ignore.

For one thing, he felt angry with the Chief who, he argued rather irrationally, ought to have foreseen and prevented Mortimer thus taking him by surprise. The Chief liked secrets--well, for a change, he should be kept in the dark and the laugh would be on Desmond's side. For a few minutes after Mortimer's departure, Desmond had felt strongly inclined to go to the telephone which stood on the desk in the library and ring up Mr. Elias, as he should have done, but he resisted this impulse. Now, thinking things over in the firelight, he was glad he had refrained. He would ferret out for himself the exact part that Nur-el-Din and Mortimer were playing in this band of spies. Nothing definite had come of his interviews with them as yet. It would be time enough to communicate with Headquarters when he had something positive to report.

Then Desmond thrust the paper he had been studying back in his pocket-book and jumped up. He felt that the inaction was stifling him. He determined to go for a walk round the garden. That, at least, was in the spirit of his orders.

Remembering that he was supposed to be suffering from a chill he donned a heavy Ulster of Bellward's which was hanging in the hall and wound a m.u.f.fler round his neck. Then cramming a soft cap on his head (he noted with satisfaction that Bellward's hats fitted him remarkably well) he opened the front door and stepped outside.

The rain had stopped, but the whole atmosphere reeked of moisture. Angry-looking, dirty-brown clouds chased each other across the lowering sky, and there was a constant sound of water, trickling and gurgling and splashing, in his ears.

An untidy-looking lawn with a few unkempt and overgrown rhododendron bushes dotted here and there ran its length in front of the house and terminated in an iron railing which separated the grounds from a little wood. A badly water-logged drive, green with gra.s.s in places, ran past the lawn in a couple of short bends to the front gate. On the other side the drive was bordered by what had once been a kitchen garden but was now a howling wilderness of dead leaves, mud and gravel with withered bushes and half a dozen black, bare and dripping apple trees set about at intervals. At the side of the house the kitchen garden stopped and was joined by a flower garden--at least so Desmond judged it to have been by a half ruined pergola which he had noticed from the drawing-room windows. Through the garden ran the mill-race which poured out of the grounds through a field and under a little bridge spanning the road outside.

Desmond followed the drive as far as the front gate. The surrounding country was as flat as a pancake, and in almost every field lay great glistening patches of water where the land had been flooded by the incessant rain. The road on which the house was built ran away on the left to the mist-shrouded horizon without another building of any kind in sight. Desmond surmised that Morstead Fen lay in the direction in which he was looking.

To the right, Desmond caught a glimpse of a ghostly spire sticking out of some trees and guessed that this was Wentfield Church. In front of him the distant roar of a pa.s.sing train showed where the Great Eastern Railway line lay.

More depressed than ever by the utter desolation of the scene, Desmond turned to retrace his steps to the house. Noticing a path traversing the kitchen garden, he followed it. It led to the back of the house, to the door of a kind of lean-to shed. The latch yielded on being pressed and Desmond entered the place.

He found himself in a fair-sized shed, very well and solidly built of pitch-pine, with a glazed window looking out on the garden, a table and a couple of chairs, and a large cupboard which occupied the whole of one side of the wall of the house against which the shed was built. In a corner of the shed stood a very good-looking Douglas motor-cycle, and on a nail on the wall hung a set of motor-cyclist's overalls. A few petrol cans, some full, some empty, stood against the wall.

Desmond examined the machine. It was in excellent condition, beautifully clean, the tank half full of spirits. A little dry sand on the tires showed that it had been used fairly recently.

"Old man Bellward's motor-bike that he goes to the station on,"

Desmond noted mentally. "But what's in the big cupboard, I wonder? Tools, I expect!"

Then he caught sight of a deep drawer in the table. It was half-open and he saw that it contained various tools and spare parts, neatly arranged, each one in its appointed place.

He went over to the cupboard and tried it. It was locked. Desmond had little respect for Mr. Bellward's property so he went over to the tool drawer and selected a stout chisel with which to burst the lock of the cupboard. But the cupboard was of oak, very solidly built, and he tried in vain to get a purchase for his implement. He leant his left hand against the edge of the cupboard whilst with his right he jabbed valiantly with the chisel.

Then an extraordinary thing happened. The whole cupboard noiselessly swung outwards while Desmond, falling forward, caught his forehead a resounding bang against the edge of the recess in which it moved. He picked himself up in a very savage frame of mind--a severe blow on the head is not the ideal cure for hypochondria--but the flow of objurgatives froze on his lips. For he found himself looking into Mr. Bellward's library.

He stepped into the room to see how the cupboard looked from the other side. He found that a whole section of bookshelves had swung back with the cupboard, in other words that the cupboard in the toolshed and the section of bookshelves were apparently all of one piece.

He carefully examined the walls on either side of the recess in the library to see how the mechanism worked. The bookshelves were open, made of mahogany, the sides elaborately carved with leaves and flowers. Desmond ran his hand down the perpendicular section immediately on the right of the recess. About halfway down--to be exact, it was in line with the fifth shelf from the floor--his fingers encountered a little k.n.o.b which gave under pressure--the heart of a flower which released the section of bookshelves.

Going back to the shed, Desmond examined the place against which his hand had rested as he sought to force the lock of the cupboard. As he expected, he found a similar catch let into the surface of the oak, but so cunningly inlaid that it could scarce be detected with the naked eye.

Before proceeding further with his investigations, Desmond softly turned the lock of the library door. He also shot forward a bolt he found on the inside of the door of the shed. He did not want to be interrupted by the housekeeper or the odd man.

Then he went back to the library and pulled the cupboard to behind him. It moved quite easily into place. He wanted to have a look at the bookshelves; for he was curious to know whether the cupboard was actually all of one piece with the section of bookshelves as it seemed to be. He was prepared to find that the books were merely library dummies, but no! He tried half a dozen shelves at random, and every book he pulled out was real.

Desmond was not easily baffled, and he determined to scrutinize every shelf, of this particular section in turn. With the aid of one of those step-ladders folding into a chair which you sometimes see in libraries, he examined the topmost shelves but without result. He took down in turn Macaulay's History of England, a handsome edition of the works of Swift, and a set of Moliere without getting any nearer the end of his quest.

The fourth shelf from the top was devoted to a library edition of Shakespeare, large books bound in red morocco. Desmond, who, by this time was getting cramp in the arms from stretching upwards and had made his hands black with dust, pulled out a couple of volumes at hazard from the set and found them real books like the rest.

"Oh, d.a.m.n!" he exclaimed, and had half a mind to abandon the search and have a go with hammer and chisel at the cupboard in the shed. By this time it was almost dusk in the library, and Desmond, before abandoning the search, struck a match to have a final rapid glance over the shelves. The light showed him a curious flatness about the backs of the last six volumes of Shakespeare. He dropped the match and laid hold of a volume of the Comedies. It resisted. He tugged. Still it would not come.

Exerting all his strength, he pulled, the gilt-lettered backs of the last six volumes came away in his hands in one piece and he crashed off the ladder to the ground.

This time he did not swear. He picked himself up quickly, lit the lamp on the table by the window, and brought it over to the bookcase. Where Shakespeare's Comedies had stood was now a gaping void with a small key stuck in a lock, above a bra.s.s handle.

Desmond mounted on the steps again and eagerly turned the key.

Then he grasped the handle and puled, the section of bookshelves swung back like a door, and he found himself face to face with a great stack of petrol cans. They lay in orderly piles stretching from the floor to the top of the bookshelves near the railing, several tiers deep. At a rough computation there must have been several hundred cans in the recess. And they were all full.

In a flash Desmond realized what his discovery signified. The motor-cycle in the shed without was the connecting link between Bellward and the man with whom he was co-operating in the organization. Under pretext of reading late in his library Bellward would send old Martha to bed, and once the house was quiet, sally forth by his secret exit and meet his confederate.

Even when he was supposed to be sleeping in London he could still use the Mill House for a rendezvous, entering and leaving by the secret door, and no one a bit the wiser. In that desolate part of Ess.e.x, the roads are practically deserted after dark. Bellward could come and go much as he pleased on his motor-cycle. Were he stopped, he always had the excuse ready that he was going to--or returning from the station. The few petrol cans that Desmond had seen openly displayed in the shed without seemed to show that Bellward received a small quant.i.ty of spirit from the Petrol Board to take him to and from the railway.

The cache, so elaborately concealed, however, pointed to long journeys. Did Bellward undertake these trips to fetch news or to transmit it? And who was his confederate? Whom did he go to meet?

Not Mortimer; for he had only, corresponded with Bellward. Nor was it Nur-el-Din; for she had never met Bellward, either.

Who was it, then?

CHAPTER XIV. BARBARA TAKES A HAND

"No luck, Mr. Marigold," said the a.s.sistant Provost Marshal, "I'm sorry, but there it is! We've made every possible inquiry about this Private... er..." he glanced at the buff-colored leave pa.s.s in his hand, "... this Gunner Barling, but we can't trace him so far. He should have gone back to France the afternoon before the day on which you found his pa.s.s. But he hasn't rejoined his unit.

He's been posted as an absentee, and the police have been warned.

I'm afraid we can't do any more than that!"

The detective looked at the officer with mild reproach in his eyes.

"Dear, dear," he replied, "and I made sure you'd be able to trace him with that pa.s.s!"

He clicked his tongue against his teeth and shook his head.

"Dear, dear!" he said again.

"What's the feller been up to?" asked the A.P.M. Detectives have a horror of leading questions, and Mr. Marigold shrank visibly before the directness of the other's inquiry. Before replying, however, he measured the officer with his calm, shrewd eye. Mr.

Marigold was not above breaking his own rules of etiquette if thereby he might gain a useful ally.

"Well, Captain Beardiston," he answered slowly, "I'll tell you because I think that you may be able to help me a little bit. It's part of your work to look after deserters and absentees and those sort o' folk, isn't it?"

The A.P.M. groaned.

"Part of my work?" he repeated, "it seems to be my whole life ever since I came back from the front."

"If you want to know what this young fellow has been up to," said Mr. Marigold in his even voice, "it's murder, if I'm not mistaken!"

"Murder?" echoed the other in surprise. "Why, not the Seven Kings murder, surely?"

The detective gave a brisk nod.

"That's it," he replied, "I'm in charge of that case, if you follow me. I found that pa.s.s in the front garden of the Mackwayte's house in Laleham Villas, half trodden into the earth of the flower-bed by a heavy boot, a service boot, studded with nails. There had been a lot of rain in the night, and it had washed the mosaic-tiled pathway up to the front door almost clean. When I was having a look round the garden, I picked up this pa.s.s, and then I spotted the trace of service boots, a bit faint, on the beds. You know the way the nails are set in the issue boots?"