No Entry Read online

  No Entry

  by Manning Coles

  First published in 1958

  This edition published by Reading Essentials

  Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

  [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  No Entry

  by Manning Coles

  * * *

  1957. More than a decade of peace (in quotes). The Hot War has given place to the Cold War, the Siegfried Line to the Iron Curtain. Behind the Curtain, dodging the East German Vopos, an Englishman named Hambledon, looking for another Englishman. . . .

  The two novelists whose light-hearted tales of espionage are signed Manning Coles once wrote of themselves: “ ‘Manning Coles’ is a partnership of Adelaide Frances Oke Manning and Cyril Henry Coles, who live in adjacent houses at the village of East Meon in Hampshire, England.” Both authors served in World War I. Coles, after joining the Hampshire Regiment “under an assumed name and an optimistic estimate of his age,” was chosen for British Intelligence and in this capacity he lived behind the lines in Germany to and past the end of the war. (Hambledon fans will not miss the parallel.) Following several wander-years he returned to England, “and the Mannings moved into the house next door. In due course A.F.O. Manning took to writing and Coles suggested that he had a book in mind and perhaps they could write it together.” The book was Drink to Yesterday, a stunning novel of espionage in World War I, pronounced by critics and readers alike a classic of its kind. Some twenty-five books later, No Entry is as contemporary as today’s newspaper.

  1: Excuse Me Again

  Goslar-am-Harz is an interesting mediaeval town in the province of Brunswick in the Western Zone of Germany. It is a magnet to draw students of mediaeval domestic architecture since, though its larger buildings can easily be paralleled or excelled elsewhere, it is very seldom indeed that one finds a town with street after entire street of houses dating from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. South of Goslar lie the Harz Mountains, not much of mountains for size but quite remarkable for beauty.

  Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon came to Goslar on a summer afternoon, not because the town is interesting and the Harz country beautiful, but because the Zonal Frontier lies ten miles to the eastward.

  Hambledon came, like a tourist, by air to Hanover and thence by train; he had a room booked at the Drei Bullochsen Hotel, room number 32. It was the room which young George Micklejohn had occupied before his disappearance three days earlier and it had been booked for Hambledon for that reason. Someone might associate it with young Micklejohn and visit it, or Micklejohn himself might return there, or there might be something to find in it—all rather unlikely, but the room was still vacant. Hambledon might as well have that room as another.

  He walked into the hotel, produced his passport, and booked in; the porter carried his suitcase upstairs and showed him a pleasant but quite ordinary room at the end of a long passage.

  “The Herr will be quiet here tonight; it so happens that the room next to his is unoccupied. The Herr will be tired after so long a journey.”

  Hambledon thanked the man for his kind thought, though in point of fact travelling did not tire him, and spent ten minutes rapidly and neatly unpacking his things and putting them away, after which he went out for a walk in the town. He loved foreign towns and this one was undeniably beautiful; also it was a lovely evening. He strolled along narrow streets with the westering sun slanting into attic windows and passed some time trying to decipher pious inscriptions, in Gothic lettering and mediaeval German, carved along the face of the great beam above the ground-floor windows. “Unless the Lord keep the house they labour in vain that build it A.D. 1621” with the 2 like a crooked capital Z. After which he sat down at a table under the arcade of the Kaiserwerth Hotel to drink beer and admire the gilded bronze bird—presumably an eagle, all heraldic birds are eagles here—which presides over the drinking fountain in the middle of the Markt-Platz.

  He went back to his hotel for dinner and sat at table after it was over, drinking a cup of coffee and a glass of cognac and looking idly out of the window. Now that the children had gone to bed the street seemed oddly quiet; there were plenty of people about but they were not happily loitering in the evening light and still less strolling in groups singing choruses. No, they went steadily about their own business or talked together in quiet voices, two or three together and not more. Well, perhaps Goslar cheered up later in the evening.

  He left the table to go up to his own room and crossed the hall to the porter’s desk to ask for his key, room number 32. The man looked behind him at the rows of numbered hooks and said: “Not here, mein Herr. Is the Herr quite sure that he handed it in?”

  Hambledon was morally certain that he had, but this is the sort of question which never fails to arouse doubt in any normal mind. He said: “Well—I thought so,” and felt in his pockets. “No, I haven’t got it.”

  “Perhaps the Herr left it in his room.”

  Again Hambledon did not believe it, but there was no point in arguing.

  “The obvious solution,” he said, smiling, “is to go upstairs and look.”

  “If there is any difficulty, the Herr has only to summon me.”

  Hambledon thanked him and walked away up the stairs. His first errand in Goslar was to introduce himself to the police, to whom he had been officially accredited; they would have had a letter from Foreign Office Intelligence about him by now, but all that would, he felt, do quite well in the morning. A quiet stroll, a harmless glass of wine in some café, a little conversation with some friendly stranger, and then to bed. Hambledon yawned and tried the door handle of his own room; to his mild surprise the door was not locked. He went in, switching on the light as he did so.

  There was a man lounging in the one easy chair by the window, apparently asleep, but there was an unpleasant-looking hole between his eyes. He was not asleep, he was quite dead.

  Hambledon shut the bedroom door quickly; the key was in the lock inside, so he turned it. Three swift strides took him to the windows, wide open upon a sultry evening, and he drew the curtains over them. Then he took a small chair from the dressing-table, planted it down opposite to his visitor, sat down upon it, and took stock.

  “You do surprise me,” he said in a low voice. “I came out here to look for you and I seem to have found you. Or have I? English clothes, and they are not common in these parts. Age about twenty-two. I should have thought you a little older, but perhaps being killed has aged you, has it? It doesn’t usually,” said Hambledon, out of ripe experience. He took a photograph from his wallet and looked from it to the dead man. “No, if you’re George Micklejohn I’m the Prophet Jonah. Just a moment—excuse me——”

  The dead man’s eyes were almost closed. Hambledon got up suddenly, lifted one of the eyelids for a moment, and sat down again.

  “That settles it,” said Tommy Hambledon. “Not even sudden death changes grey eyes to dark brown. You are not George Micklejohn. Who the devil are you? Some other Englishman? I wonder if whoever killed you left you with any identification papers. Excuse me again.”

  Hambledon went through his visitor’s pockets. There was an inner breast pocket, closed with a button and buttonhole, and in this there was something flat and stiff. Hambledon drew it out; it was a British passport and the name on the outside was G. Micklejohn. Tommy’s eyebrows went up. The passport had a rubber band round it; he slipped it off and opened th
e book, which had a folder inside containing five travellers cheques. There had been more—the perforations showed where others had been torn out—but those remaining bore the signature “G. Micklejohn” in neat, rather mannered writing. The passport itself was perfectly normal in every respect and the photograph in it was the same as that in Hambledon’s wallet. No attempt had been made to replace Micklejohn’s likeness with anyone else’s; the visitor’s, for example.

  “You know,” said Hambledon, addressing his visitor, “you are really very irritating. You have had some sort of connection with Micklejohn or you wouldn’t have his passport. Did you bring it here yourself or did somebody plant it on you? How did you know that this was his room? Don’t tell me that that was coincidence.”

  Hambledon looked round the room and rose suddenly to his feet, for one of the dressing-table drawers was ajar and the corner of a handkerchief peeped out of the gap. Hambledon, like most men who travel a great deal and who wait upon themselves, was almost finically neat in such matters. He pulled out the drawers to find that all the contents had been flung about and stuffed back at random; the suits he had hung in the wardrobe were tangled in a heap at the bottom; his suitcase also had been opened, for only one of the two catches was fastened.

  Hambledon made a hasty search through the dead man’s pockets to see if he had any identification papers of his own, but there was nothing to show who he was.

  Hambledon went out, shutting and locking the door behind him, to call upon the Goslar police.

  * * *

  On the previous day, in London, Hambledon had been summoned from his office to an interview with his chief.

  “Rather a nasty mess, Hambledon. There’s a young man gone missing near the zonal boundary between East and West Germany and it is feared that he may have crossed over and be in the hands of the Russians.”

  “Serve him right,” said Hambledon cheerfully. “Teach him to look where he’s going. Why worry? It’s not as though he’d infringed the sacred soil of Holy Russia. Or isn’t it Holy Russia these days?”

  “Some say one thing and some another, I understand. However, in this case there are complications. Young George Micklejohn——”

  “George who?”

  “Yes, that’s the whole point. His father is the wallah who is now touring the capitals of Western Europe——”

  “See Cook’s Travel Brochures.”

  “—trying to co-ordinate plans for the atomic weapon defence of NATO. The Russians, naturally, don’t approve of him at all and George is his only son.”

  “I see,” said Hambledon thoughtfully.

  “If pressure were to be applied it might be awkward.”

  “Ye-es. However much of a Roman father Micklejohn senior might be, one feels that—that his attention might be distracted, shall we say, from his work.”

  “Precisely. I would never admit that a man in Micklejohn’s position would allow himself to be deflected from his course by threats of any kind——”

  “How well you put things,” murmured Hambledon.

  His chief laughed suddenly. “Sorry. The manner is horribly infectious and I’ve had rather a lot of it lately.”

  “The solution is simple,” said Hambledon briskly. “No one has to be a Cabinet Minister if he doesn’t want to. Let Micklejohn senior resign from his high office and let another assume his mantle. Young George will then cease to be of any significance outside his loving family circle and all will be well.”

  “And the pressure will have succeeded to a certain extent. Micklejohn is a very capable man.”

  “Well, yes. There is that. You know, I have never been able, for various reasons, to take politicians very seriously. Box gives up and Cox takes on and in a week’s time the eddies have died away and there’s no change. I may be jaundiced,” admitted Hambledon kindly.

  “I think we’re wandering from the point, which is——”

  “That you want me to go and look for the wanderer, I suppose. Tell me about him.”

  “He is twenty-two years old and an undergraduate of Brasenose——”

  Hambledon bounded in his chair.

  “Oh, furies and all hell! Not another undergraduate. Of course it’s the Long Vacation, I’d forgotten. Why don’t they send them home with an iron collar welded round their necks and a strong chain to be attached to a post driven into the middle of the ancestral bowling green like cows in Normandy? Please, daddy, may I leave the room because this is where I came in?”

  “Simmer down, Hambledon. This one is a quiet decent lad who went on a walking tour with a friend, but the friend broke an ankle and returned home. Young Micklejohn wasn’t doing anything idiotic; he was staying at Goslar in the Harz Mountains, going for walks in the day and reading at night. He was there for nearly a week until one day he went out and didn’t come back.”

  “When was this?”

  “The day before yesterday, on Tuesday.”

  “Had any news of him from anyone?”

  “Only that on that Tuesday he went by bus towards the frontier and was last seen striding away into the woods. There’s a camping site somewhere out in the wilds there and it was thought that he might have met or made friends there and be staying with them. But no one there has seen him.”

  “Then there’s no evidence that he did cross into the Eastern Zone? No, then he’s just as likely to have fallen down a drain somewhere.”

  “You know better than that, Hambledon. Remote country districts in Germany don’t have drains.”

  “I still don’t understand why there is so much anxiety,” said Hambledon. “I was talking the other day to a man who had been up on that frontier with the British Occupation Forces and he told me that it was quite easy to stray into the Russian Zone—it wasn’t very well marked—so when they saw a Russian uniform they used to run back. Of course they were in uniform, which might make it awkward, but a young man, a student in civilian clothes, couldn’t come to much harm, surely? Of course if he turned nasty they might put him inside for a few days.”

  “I don’t think your informant was there very recently.”

  “Well, no. About four years ago or so.”

  “Things are very different now, Hambledon. There is something like a cold war going on along that frontier; it is closed now, really closed. A barbed-wire fence, like that round a concentration camp, patrolled by armed men. People get killed on that frontier now.”

  “Oh, indeed,” said Hambledon slowly. “No, I didn’t know that. I’ve had no reason to take any interest in that frontier, you know, and one has a general idea that communications are getting easier all the time, not worse.

  “That is not true of the East-West German Zonal Frontier.”

  “Evidently not, but it’s surprising all the same. I shall be interested to see it.”

  Hambledon was supplied with a photograph of George Micklejohn and a full description of him.

  On the following day Hambledon flew to Hanover and went on by train to Goslar.

  * * *

  He left the dead man in his room and went to the police station, where he sent in his card and asked to see the Chief of Police if he happened to be still on the premises. He was, as it happened, and Hambledon was received with some ceremony. But, of course, the Herr Hambledon’s credentials had already been received; there was a letter, yes, yes. The Herr was most welcome; it was a privilege to meet one so high in the famous Intelligence Service of England. Let the Herr be seated, please. A little glass of wine, a cigar, or perhaps a cigarette was preferred? What a wonderful summer, really, the weather was excelling itself.

  Hambledon responded suitably, took a sip of an excellent wine, and settled his broad shoulders comfortably against the high back of his chair. He then said that, repulsive as it must be to persons with any idea of manners to start talking business at that hour in the evening, he must ask whether the Chief of Police was aware that he, Hambledon, had come to Goslar to look for one George Micklejohn, unaccountably missing.

&n
bsp; A slight cloud passed across the German’s face.

  “Yes, yes indeed. Enquiries have been received from the highest levels. This young man is the son of a member of your Government, is he not?”

  “He is,” said Tommy, “and a blasted nuisance you must think him.”

  The Chief of Police grinned suddenly.

  “We like having foreign visitors in Goslar,” he said, “but I must admit we prefer them not to lose themselves.”

  “Has he, do you think, simply wandered off into your wooded hills and met with some accident?”

  “I wish I could think so—I beg your pardon. I should be very sorry if such a thing had happened to any visitor, but such evidence as we have does not suggest that.” Hambledon looked expectant and the Chief of Police went on: “The last news we have is that he, or a young man answering to his description, went from Bad Harzburg by autobus to Eckertal on the frontier and was not seen to return. Our police there saw him alight and walk towards the frontier; that is quite a common occurrence. The Herr will understand that many people—mainly our own countrymen—find a painful interest in going up to the Zonal Frontier and looking across the barricades into Eastern Germany, particularly if they have friends over there. We have many refugees in this area from the Soviet Zone, as the Herr may have heard.”

  “Can I assume, then, that it is possible for this young man to have crossed the frontier?”

  “It is possible,” said the Chief noncommittally. “But highly inadvisable.”

  “I see. I have here,” said Hambledon, putting his hand in his pocket, “Micklejohn’s passport.” He laid it upon the desk and the Chief of Police picked it up.

  “I do not quite understand,” he said. “Was it, then, at the hotel after all? We were told that it was not there.”

  “A man brought it to my room,” said Hambledon. “At least, I assume he brought it.”