Strange Conflict (6 page)

Sir Pellinore glanced at the clock and stood up. ‘Well,' he said, with his genial bluffness, ‘it's been a most interesting evening—thoroughly enjoyed myself—but I must be getting along.'

‘No, no,' said the Duke. ‘I can see that you still think I'm
talking nonsense, but in fairness to me you must await the outcome of my magical experiment.'

‘What have you been up to?' Simon inquired with sudden interest, but the others ignored him, as Sir Pellinore replied:

‘Of course I will, if you wish, but honestly, my dear fellow, I don't think anything you could do would really convince me. All this business about silver cords, spirits committing murder, and even one's immortal soul not being safe in God's keeping, is a bit too much for a man of my age to swallow.'

At that moment there was another knock on the door and Max stood there again. ‘Excellency, Mr. Rex Van Ryn and Mr. Richard Eaton are here and wish to know if you will receive them.'

‘Certainly,' said the Duke. ‘Ask them to come in.'

Rex, tall, broad-shouldered, in the uniform of an R.A.F. flight-lieutenant but leaning heavily on a stick, was the first to enter, and Sir Pellinore greeted him with hearty congratulations on his D.F.C. Richard, much slighter in build, followed him and was duly introduced.

‘Well, well,' laughed Sir Pellinore to his host, ‘it seems that you're holding quite a reception tonight, and the four famous companions are now reunited.'

A broad smile lit Rex's ugly attractive face as he said to the Duke: ‘Richard and I had just negotiated a spot of dinner together round the corner, at the Dorchester, when we had a hunch, almost simultaneously, that after we'd finished our magnum it'd be a great idea to drop along and take a brandy off you.'

De Richleau turned to Sir Pellinore. ‘The note that I gave you—would you produce it now?'

Sir Pellinore fished in his pocket, brought out the envelope, ripped it open and read what the Duke had written half an hour before. It ran as follows:

‘You will bear witness that since writing this note I have not left your presence, used the telephone, or communicated in any way with my servants. You expressed the wish, just after dinner, to meet my friends, Simon Aron, Rex Van Ryn, and Richard Eaton.

‘If they are not in London the ceremony that I propose
to perform will not be successful, because they will not have time to reach here before you go home, but if, as I believe, they are, it is virtually certain that at least one of them will put in an appearance here before midnight.

‘If any or all of them turn up I shall see to it that they testify, without prompting, that they have not called upon me by arrangement but have done so purely owing to a sudden idea that they would like to see me which came into their minds. That idea is no matter of mere chance but because
through a magical ceremony I have conveyed to them my will that they shall appear here.

‘If the ceremony is successful I trust that this will convince you that the Nazis may use magic for infinitely more nefarious purposes and that it is
our
duty to conduct an investigation in this matter with the least possible delay.'

Sir Pellinore lowered the note and glanced round the little circle. His blue eyes held a strange, puzzled look, as he exclaimed:

‘By God, I'd never have believed it! You win, Duke, I've got to admit that. Mind you, that's not to say I'm prepared to swallow all the extraordinary things you've said this evening. Still, in a case like this we can't afford to neglect
any
avenue. Our Atlantic Life-line is our one weak spot and it may be—yes, it may be that in those slender hands of yours lies the Victory or Defeat of Britain.'

‘I shall need help,' said the Duke gravely.

‘Anything in reason for which you care to ask shall be given to you,' Sir Pellinore replied at once.

‘I meant
skilled
help—people who understand something of psychic lore—who can work with me and whom I can trust.' De Richleau glanced round at his friends. ‘I take it that I can count upon you three?'

Simon nodded, and Richard said with a smile: ‘Of course; but as Rex and I have only just turned up we haven't the faintest idea yet what all this is about.'

Sir Pellinore told them, upon which Rex said:

‘All three of us were with the Duke in that ghastly Talisman of Set affair, so we're acquainted with the occult sufficiently to lend a hand under his direction, but right now I'm tied up with the Royal Air Force.'

‘I could arrange for your leave to be indefinitely extended,' said Sir Pellinore.

‘Good,' remarked the Duke. ‘Richard is his own master; but how about you, Simon? Can you manage to get away from your office possibly for several weeks?'

‘Um—don't want to a bit, but this is obviously more important.'

As the Duke spoke again his first words were almost drowned in the booming of the guns, but the others just caught them.

‘If we're going to wage war on the astral plane we'll have to leave London. It's essential that we should be able to work in some place where we shall run as little risk as
possible of being disturbed by purely physical excitements.'

‘You'd better all come down and stay at Cardinals Folly,' suggested Richard at once. ‘We hardly even hear a plane go over down there in the depths of the country, and you know that Marie Lou would be delighted to have you.'

‘No, Richard,' de Richleau shook his head. ‘We brought quite enough trouble on Marie Lou last time we broke a lance against the Devil, and with Fleur in the house I wouldn't even consider it.'

‘Fleur's not in the house; she's sharing a governess with another little girl, the daughter of friends of mine who live up in Scotland. And remember, as Marie Lou was involved last time she knows as much about this sort of thing as Simon, Rex or myself.'

De Richleau considered for a moment. He knew that Richard's beautiful little wife had an abundance of sound common sense as well as an extraordinarily strong will and that, as had often happened before, her counsel might be most useful to them. This was Total war, and while women everywhere were risking their lives to carry on the nation's work during the blitzkrieg there could be no case for exempting a woman from this very curious job of war work in which she could be just as effective as any man. At length he said:

‘Thanks, then, Richard; we'll accept your offer. The next thing is for me to meet the man at the Admiralty who decides the routes that the convoys are to take.'

Sir Pellinore looked a little startled. ‘I, er …' he began, ‘I hardly feel that we can let the Admiral in on what you propose to do. You've made me feel that it's just possible that you've hit the nail on the head as to the manner in which this leakage of information is reaching Germany, but I'm afraid you'd find him a much more sticky proposition.'

‘It's not necessary,' smiled the Duke. ‘All I need is to meet him socially for an hour or two.'

‘Well, that's easy. I've already arranged for him to lunch with me tomorrow because I felt pretty confident that I could interest you in this business tonight; and as no time must be lost in getting to work I was hoping that you would join us so that you could put up any questions you might have.'

‘Splendid. A general discussion on the subject would, in any case, prove helpful, and of course it's still quite possible that my theory that the occult is being used is entirely wrong.' De Richleau looked round at the others. ‘Then, if you're agreeable, we'll all go down to Cardinals Folly in the afternoon.'

They sat talking together for another half-hour, then there came a lull in the blitzkrieg so de Richleau's guests decided to set off for home before it flared up again.

On the following day the Duke lunched with the Admiral and a naval staff-captain, at Sir Pellinore's mansion in Carlton House Terrace. The Admiral was square-chinned, paunchy and bald; the Captain a merry-eyed man with sparse brown hair and a fine, broad forehead.

They held a long discussion, and afterwards examined a number of large-scale charts of the Western and Northwestern Approaches which the naval officers had brought with them. The situation was considerably worse than de Richleau had imagined and he questioned the Admiral as to how many people actually had access to each route planned before it was handed to the officer commanding a convoy.

The Admiral jerked his pink, bald head towards the Captain. ‘Nobody except Fennimere and myself. We plot the routes together, taking into consideration the latest information regarding enemy forces in each locality; then Fennimere writes the orders out by hand, so that there is no question of even a confidential typist being involved. The orders are sealed in a canvas-lined envelope which is weighted with lead so that it can be thrown into the sea and will sink immediately in the event of an emergency. It is then locked in a steel despatch-box which Fennimere personally takes to the port from which the convoy is proceeding. He hands it over to the officer commanding the escort, who in turn hands it to the officer commanding the convoy—but only when the convoy is already several hundred miles out and the escort is about to return to port. In this manner even the officer commanding the convoy cannot possibly know what route he is to take until he is actually at sea, since the sealed orders do not even pass into his possession until the escort is about to leave him.'

‘That certainly narrows the field,' said the Duke, ‘and I
don't see how you could possibly take any greater precautions.'

The Admiral shrugged wearily. ‘Neither do I. The problem as to how they get their information defeats me utterly, and you'll be doing us an immense service if only you can put your finger upon the place where the leakage occurs.'

‘You see,' added Fennimere, ‘even if one of the officers commanding a convoy were a traitor and had a secret wireless apparatus by which he could inform the enemy of his approximate position twenty-four hours after the escort had left him, that does not solve the problem, because it postulates that every officer commanding a convoy is a traitor—which is manifestly absurd.'

‘Yes, I appreciate that,' the Duke agreed. ‘Therefore the leakage must occur in London, where the routes of all convoys are settled. May I have your private address?'

The Captain looked a little surprised, but the Admiral smiled. ‘He's perfectly logical in assuming that it must be you or I, Fennimere, and since the Intelligence people have been shadowing both of us for weeks what does one more sleuth matter?—in fact the more the better. If only they would provide a couple of attractive young women to sleep with us each night our innocence would be proved conclusively.'

‘Of course you're right, sir,' Fennimere laughed. ‘I'm quite used to tripping over detectives wherever I go now, so if His Grace pops out of the bathroom cupboard one morning I shan't mind a bit.' He turned to de Richleau. ‘I've taken a temporary lease of a flat, No. 43, North Gate Mansions, Regent's Park, and the Admiral has a house, No. 22, Orme Square, Bayswater.'

‘If you'd care to look over the place any time,' the Admiral suggested, ‘I'll leave word with my wife that you're to have the run of it for as long as you like.'

‘The same goes for my flat,' added the Captain.

‘Thank you, gentlemen, but I only asked for your private addresses in case I wanted to get in touch with you urgently,' lied the Duke smoothly.

An hour later he was with Rex, Simon and Richard in the latter's car running through the half-empty streets of bomb-torn London on the way to Worcestershire.

The last part of their journey had to be done in the
blackout, but Richard knew the way so well that when they left the great arterial road he had no difficulty in twisting through the narrow country lanes until he drove through the open park-gates and pulled up in front of his lovely country home.

The east wing of the rambling old house was very ancient and said to have been at one time part of a great abbey, but centuries later these thick-walled remains had been built on to, while in recent years Richard and his lovely wife, the some-time Princess Marie Louise Héloise Aphrodite Blankfort De Cantezane de Schulemoff, had spared neither pains nor money to make its interior both comfortable and beautiful. The heavy, oak, nail-studded door was no sooner opened by Malin, Richard's elderly butler, than Marie Lou herself came running forward to welcome them.

She was a tiny person with chestnut curls, a heart-shaped face and big, violet eyes which gave her a certain resemblance to a Persian kitten. In spite of her diminutive size and her slim feet, hands, wrists and ankles, she was plump in all the right places, so that de Richleau often said that she was the most exquisite creature that he had ever seen, and many people nicknamed her ‘Richard's Pocket Venus'. Their devotion to each other had remained absolute ever since the days when he had found her among the Siberian snows and brought her out of the Forbidden Territory to be his wife.

They embraced as though they had not met for months, and when at last he released her she said breathlessly: ‘Darling, I only had your telegram an hour ago, although you send it off last night. None of the rooms are ready yet, but the maids are busy lighting the fires and putting bottles in the beds, and it's too lovely for words to have you all here again.' As she spoke she tiptoed from one to the other, giving each a swift kiss upon the cheek.

Malin had gone out to unload the car as the Duke smiled down at her. ‘Perhaps it's just as well, Princess, because I have a somewhat unusual request to make. It is that I should be allowed to sleep in the library.'

‘Greyeyes, darling!' she exclaimed. ‘Surely you, of all people, aren't afraid of bombs! We haven't had one within miles of Cardinals Folly, so you'll be perfectly safe in your
old room upstairs; but of course you can sleep in the library if you prefer.'