Алистер Маклин - The Satan Bug

“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 Hardanger 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 lets 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 I’ll 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 warmer 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.”

“Is that all you want?” The General was heavily ironic.

“I think it essential, sir.”

“Is it? How about this excellent alibi he provided – the pictures of the transit of Jupiter or whatever it was – that could prove his presence at home down to a second, more or less. Don’t you believe it?”

“I believe those pictures would show exactly when they were taken. I don’t necessarily believe that Chessingham was there when they were taken. He’s not only a fine scientist but an uncommonly clever lad with his hands. He built his own camera, radio and TV set. He built his own reflector telescope even hand-grinding the lenses. It would be no great trick for Chessingham to rig up a mechanism to take pictures automatically at pre-selected intervals. Or someone could have done it for him while he was elsewhere. Or the photographs themselves could have been taken elsewhere with a corresponding time allowance made for longitude differences so as to give the same effect. And Chessingham’s far too intelligent a bird not to have spotted right away that those photographs would have provided an alibi – yet he pretended that it only occurred to him while I was talking to him. He’d have thought it would have been too obvious and suspicious if it had all been cut and dried in advance.”

“You wouldn’t trust St. Peter himself, would you, Cavell?”

“I might. If there were sufficient independent witnesses to testify to any alibi he might have, that is. Giving anyone even the faintest shadow of the benefit of the doubt is the one luxury I can’t afford. You know that, sir. And Chessingham isn’t getting that shadow. Nor is Hartnell.”

“Hmm.” He peered at me under the tufted grey of his eyebrows and said inconsequentially, “Easton Derry vanished because he played it too close to the cuff. I wonder how much you are holding back from me, Cavell?”

“What makes you say that, sir?”

“God knows, I’m a fool to ask you. As if you’d tell me anyway.” He poured a whisky for himself but placed it on the mantelshelf without tasting it. “What’s behind all this, my boy?”

“Blackmail. Of one kind or another. Our friend with the Satan Bug and botulinus virus in his pants pocket has the finest blackmail weapon in history. He’s probably after money – very large sums of money. If the Government want back the bugs, it’ll cost them a fortune. Additional blackmail is that if the Government don’t come across he’ll sell the bugs to a foreign power. At least, that’s what I hope. What I’m afraid of is that we’re dealing with not a criminal but a crackpot mind. Don’t tell me that a crackpot couldn’t have organised all this – some crackpots are brilliant. If it is a crackpot it’ll be one of the ‘Mankind must abolish war or war will abolish Mankind’ brigade. In this case the threat would be on a smaller scale – you know ‘Britain must abolish Mordon or I’ll abolish Britain.’ That sort of thing. Probably a letter in the post right now to one of the big national dailies telling them he has the viruses and what he intends doing with them.”