“X, of course, can’t just pocket the viruses, knock off Baxter and remove himself. As far as the gate guard is concerned, X has already checked out. He can’t check out a second time. He knows it won’t be safe to move until the last of the security rounds have been finished at 11 p.m. He waits till then, takes the viruses, belts Baxter over the head with his gun-butt and leaves, throwing a virus toxin at the unconscious man. He has to kill Baxter, because Baxter knew who he was. He didn’t know, as we did, that Clandon was keeping a binocular watch every night on the corridor in ‘ E’ block, but it’s highly likely that he suspected he might. He’s not the man who would leave anything to chance. He must have known that this was the one possibility that might upset his plans. Hence the cyanide sweet. When Clandon came up after X had shut the door, X must have spun some yarn and got Clandon to accept the sweet. He obviously knew Clandon well and Clandon knew him.”
The General rubbed his moustache thoughtfully. “Ingenious, if nothing else. Basically, you must be right. But there’s something wrong about that cyanide business. Far wrong. Clandon was looking for a man that had been stealing virus supplies and he must have suspected that X was the man. I just don’t see Clandon accepting this butterscotch. Besides, X was carrying a gun, probably silenced. Why not that? Why the cyanide?”
“I don’t know, sir.” I felt like adding that I hadn’t been there.
“How did you get on to this in the first place?”
“The dog, sir. It had a couple of barbed wire tears in its throat. It seemed likely that there might be blood on the wire itself. There was. It took me an hour to find it. On the inner wire. No one broke into Mordon that night: someone broke out.”
“Why didn’t Hardanger discover this?”
“He’d no reason to suspect what I did. I knew that Baxter hadn’t broken in and a check with the gate guard showed that Baxter had his face covered with a handkerchief and talked thickly through a cold when he left. That was enough. Besides, Hardanger’s men did get around to examining the wires. They concentrated on the outside one for an hour or so and then moved to the inner fence.”
“And found nothing?”
“There was nothing to find. I’d removed the blood.”
“You’re an unethical devil, Cavell.”
“Yes, sir.” That was good coming from him. “Then a visit to Bryson and Chipperfield. A couple of steady reliable characters drinking like fish at five-thirty in the afternoon and spilling it when they poured. Mrs. Bryson smoking like a factory chimney — she’s never smoked in her life. General air of quiet desperation, well concealed. But all very obvious.”
“Suspects?”
“There’s General Cliveden and Colonel Weybridge. Cliveden was in London at the time of the killing but although he’s only been in Mordon two or three times since taking over he has two things against him. He has access to the security files and may have known of Hartnell’s financial troubles — and it was strange that such a gallant soldier didn’t volunteer to go into the lab instead of me. It was his place, not mine — he bosses Mordon.”
“The two words ‘ gallant’ and ‘ soldier’ are not necessarily synonymous,” the General said dryly. “Remember he’s a doctor, not a fighting man.”
“That’s so. I also remember that two of the handful of double V.C.’s ever won were won by doctors. It doesn’t matter. Same two arguments apply to Weybridge, with the additional two factors that he lives on the premises and has no alibi Gregori, because he was too insistent for what I regarded as insufficient reason to have the placed sealed off for keeps. But the fact of the insistence itself, being so obvious, may remove suspicion, as does the fact that the virus locker door was opened by a key — and Gregori had what was thought to be the only key. What do we really know about Gregori, sir?”
“The lot. Every step he’s taken from the cradle. The fact that he’s not a British national made his screening twice as intensive as normal. That’s from our side. Before he came here he was doing highly secret work in Turin for the Italian government and you can imagine the thorough going over Gregori got from them. He’s absolutely in the clear.”
“Which should make me pretty reluctant to waste time on him. Only trouble is, judging from past records, everyone else seems in the clear also. Anyway, these are the first three suspects — and I think Hardanger is beginning to have ideas about one or more of these three.”
“The ideas he got from you, eh?”
“I don’t like it, sir. I don’t like it because Hardaager is as straight as they come and it goes against the grain to operate behind his back. I don’t like saying or doing things which amount to deliberately misleading and deceiving him. And I don’t like it because Hardanger is very smart indeed and to keep him from tumbling to me I’ve got to devote almost as much time to keeping Hardanger reasonably satisfied as to investigating the case itself.”
“Don’t think I like it either,” the General said heavily. “But it has to be. We’re up against clever and determined men whose main weapons are secrecy, cunning and—–”
“And violence.”
“All right then. Secrecy, cunning and violence. We must meet and destroy them on their chosen ground. I must employ the best weapon that comes to my hand. I know of no man who could or would presume to instruct you in any of those three. Secrecy. Cunning. Violence.”
“I haven’t been very cunning so far.”
“You haven’t,” the General admitted. “On the other hand, when I said to you that you’d made a mess of things, I was being less than fair. The initiative invariably rests with the criminal. Anyway, what matters is that you are essentially a loner, a one man band, while Hardanger is just as essentially an organisation man. With an organisation comes delegation of authority, dispersal of concentration, blunting of initiative and lowered secrecy: and any and all of those mitigate against the chances of final success. Nevertheless the organisation is indispensable to you: it carries out all the groundwork and routine investigation that you couldn’t possibly do yourself and diverts attention and suspicion from yourself: as long as Hardanger, unwittingly or no, misleads the killer or killers as to the direction the inquiry is taking — well, that’s all I want out of him.”
“He’s not going to like it when he finds out, sir.”
“If he finds out, Cavell. And that’s for me to worry about.”
“Other suspects?”
“The four technicians. Barely possible. All of them were seen moving around during the evening at one time or another and on the assumption that the killer was holed up in the lab between six and eleven o’clock that let’s them out. As far as the murders were concerned. Hardanger is carrying out a minute by minute check of their late evening movements — one of them might have been a decoy. So might a thousand others — the decoy doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with number one lab. Hartnell would appear to be in the clear — his alibi is so hopeless that it would seem to have to be genuine — but for all that I have a feeling that there’s something queer going on there and 111 be calling on him again.
“Then there’s Chessingham — a very big question mark. As an assistant research chemist his salary is no shakes — but it seems he can afford to run a big house, have a maid and keep his sister at home to look after his mother. The maid’s been there only two months. His mother, incidentally, is in a very bad way from a health view-point. Her doctor says that a shift to a wanner climate might add years to her life. She herself maintains that she doesn’t want this shift, but that’s probably only because she doesn’t want to embarrass her son who she knows can’t afford it. Maybe Chessingham would like the money to send her abroad. I’m sure, in fact, They’re a pretty close family. I don’t want Hardanger on this. Can you arrange to have Chessingham’s bank account checked, a monitoring watch kept on all incoming and outgoing mail, a check made with local authorities to see whether a driving licence has ever been issued in his name, a check made with the army unit in which he did his National Service to see if he ever drove a vehicle and, finally, a check on all the local money-lenders to see if Chessingham’s on their books. He’s certainly not with Tuffnell and Hanbury, the biggest sharks in the area, but there are a dozen others within twenty miles — and Chessingham never strays far from home. He may be borrowing money by mail from some London firm.”