The Fifth Man Page 5

  “Who the devil are you?”

  “My name is Anthony Colemore, son of the late Roger Colemore, the etymologist.”

  “Colemore,” said Hambledon slowly. “The name conveys something—I heard it mentioned only the other day—”

  “I was the man who came such a purler over that whisky-smuggling case. That’s one reason why I wasn’t anxious to hobnob with Chief Inspector Bagshott and Co. You see, I didn’t finish my sentence.”

  “You broke jail, didn’t you, if I remember correctly?”

  “Yes. I was bored; I hate being shut up. Being locked in at night—ugh!”

  “I can, of course, check your identity by your fingerprints,” said Hambledon.

  “If you do I go back to jail,” Colemore pointed out

  “Not necessarily,” said Hambledon. “If I ask for the identification of fingerprints they don’t automatically assume that I’ve got the body.”

  “Stupid of me,” murmured Colemore. “‘Conscience makes cowards,’ you know. I suppose it’s conscience, since I don’t suffer from indigestion.”

  “Nor do I necessarily have to hand people over to the police because they happen to want ’em. Let your mind be at rest on that point and tell me how you come to be posing as Brampton?”

  “I came across him during the retreat from the Albert Canal. He was pretty badly wounded, and I stayed by him just too long; by the time he died I couldn’t get away. It occurred to me that I’d have a better time as a prisoner if the Boche thought I was a British officer, so I changed clothes with him, took his papers and odds and ends, and gave myself up.”

  “Did you know him before?”

  “No,” said Colemore. “What’s more, I knew practically nothing about him till you gave me his life’s history just now. I gathered from the Nazi general or what not who interviewed me that I had an interestingly peculiar sort of uncle, that was all. As regards being able to talk German, I started off by refusing to understand it mainly in order to annoy them, I’m afraid. Then when this Intelligence fellow implied that I’d been fluent in it for years I went all mysterious and suggested that it would be to everybody’s advantage if that was kept a secret. He looked puzzled and said, ‘How wise of you.’ What I’d have said if he’d simply asked, ‘Why?’ I really don’t know.”

  Hambledon laughed. “He thought there was some inner meaning he was supposed to see but didn’t, and he wouldn’t admit it. The gentle Nazi to the life. That’s what happens when men are given jobs not because they’re fitted for them, but because they are deserving Party members.”

  “It might have some funny results even here if only good Conservatives were admitted to British Intelligence.”

  “Heaven forbid. Well, you do seem to have landed yourself into rather a sticky mess, Colemore, what with the police and the Nazis. Suppose you tell me all about it and we’ll see what it all boils down to. Start at the beginning and go right on to the end.”

  “What, my boyhood days and all?”

  Hambledon nodded.

  “Well, you’ve brought it on yourself.” Colemore settled himself more comfortably in his chair and began:.

  “My father was a rather weird old bird, but he was a real expert on languages. I don’t mean merely a good linguist; he was interested in the origins of words and how they changed as they were absorbed into the speech of different peoples. He used to hunt words through various cognate dialects with the enthusiasm of a deerstalker after a fourteen-pointer, only his chases would lead right across Europe. Then he’d come home and read papers to learned societies. I can’t think why he ever married anything more human than a dictionary, but he did. My mother died when I was five, and after that he used to trail me round with him everywhere. We’d go to some place for a week and stay there six months; after a bit he’d look at me as though he’d just remembered I was there and say, ‘School. You ought to be at school,’ and into school I went wherever we happened to be. I remember one year when I had one term in Serbia, another in Albania, and the third in Greece.”

  “What a dreadful idea,” said the bonified Hambledon, once a schoolmaster himself.

  “Oh, I don’t know. You learn to stand on your own feet and how other people think and all that. I learned a lot of languages besides German too; you do when you’re a small boy.”

  Etymology is not, it appears, a very highly paid career, and most of the eminent Roger Colemore’s money came from investments. He thought he was good at foreseeing which industries were going to increase in importance and he changed his investments accordingly.

  “Oh dear,” said Hambledon. “I’ve met people who thought that. One of them cleans my boots every morning.”

  “Father wasn’t as bad as that,” said Anthony Colemore. “After the last war, when there was a lot of rebuilding in progress, he said cement was the goods. So he invested our all in cement. We were almost rich for a time and my schools became quite luxurious and exclusive. I was practically hovering on the brink of Harrow when Clarence Hatry fell down. So did our fortunes.”

  “After your previous experiences,” said Hambledon sympathetically, “you might have found Harrow a trifle difficult How old were you then?”

  “Sixteen,” said Colemore. “I daresay you’re right—about Harrow, I mean. Well, at that point Father died and the fun really began. We were in England then, as it happened. Kind friends of my father’s rallied round and gave me good advice. You can imagine it. ‘Work, my boy. Honest work never hurt any man.’ All I knew was how to live comfortably anywhere and talk about eight languages. So they found me a job in a city wine merchant’s office. One of the old-established ones preserved in cobwebs.”

  “Talking about wine merchants,” said Hambledon, “I think a little weak whisky and water won’t hurt us. I keep some here. Don’t let me interrupt you,”

  “I should love you to,” said Colemore, “with that. How on earth do you manage to get it these days?”

  “Oh, a spot of blackmail,” said Hambledon airily. “Here’s yours. Please carry on.”

  Young Colemore endured the wine merchant’s office for as long as he could, which was fifteen months, and then left for another post which promised more and performed much less. He went from one job to another, each a little less satisfactory than the last. “Some of ’em didn’t pay too badly, but I just couldn’t stand ’em. I remember once I met a man in a train, rather the slick-salesman type, but not a bad fellow. He had a couple of big suitcases with him. He put me up to his line of business, which was buying cheap lines in the East End and peddling them from door to door in places like Surbiton or Esher. ‘Superior novelties, my boy,’ he said. ‘Small profits and quick returns.’ So I got a pedlar’s certificate and tried it; you’d be surprised what a paying game it is. But what a life! I stuck it out for eight months, by which time I’d got suitcase carrier’s shoulder, bell pusher’s thumb, hawker’s brass-face, and a chronic ingratiating manner. So I left that alone-forever.”

  “I thought I’d done a few odd jobs in the course of my misspent life,” said the amused Hambledon, “but you beat me. Carry on, please.”

  “Sure this isn’t boring you? Well, there’s no accounting for tastes, and, d’you know, it’s rather fun telling it aU. I’ve never done so before,” said Colemore.

  He travelled to Southhampton in 1930 to try for a job on the harbour works and went into a public house in the dock area for a glass of beer and a couple of sandwiches, funds not permitting of a more spacious meal. At the bar he fell into conversation with a tall thin man in a blue-and-white striped cotton monkey jacket which young Colemore recognized as the undress uniform of a snip’s steward. The thin—man said that he was a dining-saloon steward on the R.M.S.P. liner Orbita, at present on the Western Ocean run. New York to Hamburg, calling at Southhampton en route.

  “Got long in Southhampton?” asked Colemore.

  “Only four hours. We have five days at New York and a fortnight at Hamburg; they’re the real ends of the run, you see,
though this is our port of registration. Besides, repairs and overhaul come cheaper in Hamburg.”

  “Doesn’t seem long to spend in your homeland,” suggested Colemore.

  “Hamburg’s more like home to most of us stewards. We don’t go ashore in New York much,” said the steward.

  “Why not?”

  “Too expensive.”

  Colemore gathered by degrees that it was a dog’s life with compensations. The hours were long and trying and the pay was not extravagant, but the tips made up for many shortcomings, especially if you were a B.R.

  “What’s that?”

  “Bedroom steward.” This voyage was going to be worse than most because they were shorthanded. “We shall be one at a table ‘stead of two if we don’t look out. Some of our chaps went on the ran-tan in Hamburg and got left on the beach.”

  “Come again?”

  “Missed the ship.”

  “I say,” said Anthony Colemore, “do you think there’s a chance of my getting a job on the Orbita?”

  “Ever been a waiter?”

  “No. But I can speak a lot of different languages.”

  “Can you really? But surely you don’t want a job like that, then.”

  “Don’t I?” said Colemore. “I was going along to the new harbour works to ask for a navvying job.”

  “Oh lor’. Well, we’re better than that. You might manage it if you don’t mind doing a dockhead jump. Come along,” said the steward, glancing at his watch and sliding hurriedly off his high stool. “What you want is the Providore’s Department. Come on, I’ll take you.”

  So they interviewed a man in an office who looked at young Colemore without any particular enthusiasm but eventually said he could have a try at it and they’d see how he shaped. “Do you want an advance?”

  The steward nudged him and whispered, “Say yes,” so Colemore said, “Yes, please,” and received two pounds in advance.

  “Now,” said the steward, leading the way out at a rapid pace, “we’ll take a cab and dash up to Baker’s to get your slops.”

  “Wouldn’t it be quicker if we took a taxi?”

  “No. We always take a cab. By the way, they call me the Colonel.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I expect it was because I was a temporary gentleman in the last war.”

  Colemore stayed for five years with the Royal Mail Line and saved quite a fair sum of money. He made one friend in Hamburg, a young man in the company’s office who happened to be a Dutchman. In fact, they became friendly in the first place because Colemore could speak fluent Dutch and Van Drom liked to use his native tongue in his hours of ease. He regarded German as a debased dialect and the Germans as mediaeval barbarians incapable of the higher civilization, Which is to live peaceably with one’s neighbours.

  “Sometimes I didn’t see him for a year or more, when I was on the South American run,” said Colemore. “But we stewards always like to get on the Western Ocean run in the winter, and whenever I went to Hamburg I used to look him up.”

  In the early spring of 1935 Van Drom said that when he was at home—which was Flushing—for Christmas, some men he knew had made a suggestion to him. It was a scheme by which scotch whisky, sent overseas in bond, should be acquired from the warehouses in Holland and smuggled back into England. “There was a lot of money in it,” said Colemore, “and Van Drom always had expensive tastes, especially for a Dutchman. You see, whisky in itself is cheap enough; it’s only the excise duty which makes it so dear in England. So if we could buy it abroad without the duty having been paid on it, we could afford to sell it in England a lot cheaper than anyone could buy it anywhere else, and still make a big profit. Besides, whisky made for export is ten or twenty per cent overproof—that’s a lot stronger than the ordinary stuff—so any publican who bought it for resale could water it down and no harm done. In fact, he’d have to, or somebody would spot it for export whisky and ask awkward questions about its origin.”

  Van Drom and his friends formed a sort of syndicate. “I never knew how they managed the Dutch end,” said Colemore. “Getting hold of the whisky, I mean. I thought it more tactful not to enquire. No business of mine.” What they wanted was an English partner who would run it across for them and arrange for its disposal in England. Somebody with a fast cabin cruiser who could look like an enthuiastic and not too intelligent amateur yachtsman, with more money than sense. “Always blowing ashore at places like Harwich and Sandwich and Rye and Littlehampton and Lymington, all togged up to the nines to give the girls a treat.” The real business would be done in smaller nooks and inlets of the coast, where elderly boatmen would row out to where the cabin cruiser had dropped her mud hook and return ashore with cases tactfully draped with tarpaulin. “You’d be surprised how easy it was,” said Colemore. “Do you know, I’ve actually landed cases on the beach at Hayling Island in broad daylight and dumped them in a bathing box to be collected by lorry after dark? It’s a fact.”

  Colemore explained that the business was, of course, only run in the summer, but it was so profitable that he could live comfortably on the proceeds throughout the winter months “and even put a bit by for my problematical old age.” When the fashion came in for small but highly efficient cameras and an import duty was put upon foreign-made ones, he took to smuggling Leica cameras too. “They were quite safe unless you wanted to take one abroad with you, when you had to declare its number. Then, if the officials looked it up and found it wasn’t one of the numbers listed as having passed through customs, there was trouble. Otherwise it was all sigarney, as Dad used to say. One of his sample words, though I don’t know what it was a sample of.”

  All things, however, draw to evensong sooner or later, and so did Colemore’s profitable trade. “It all started with a publican in a Hampshire market town who didn’t bother to break down the whisky to the right strength. He got quite a reputation for his wonderful whisky, I believe, and other publicans bought their supplies from him. All went well till the exciseman turned up with his little hydrometer and tested the whisky. Our friend had been in trouble once before for watering his stuff, and the exciseman was naturally hopeful that it would happen again. This time the mistake was on the other foot, as it were; the hydrometer nearly jumped out of the glass because the whisky was too strong instead of too weak.”

  Colemore at that time was running a big consignment across in two lots and was delayed in Holland with engine trouble. He had the boat’s engines overhauled in Rotterdam and came into Bosham Harbour one fine summer’s morning a fortnight after his first delivery instead of only two or three days. The police had spent the intervening fortnight making enquiries, and whisky had been popping up all over the place. “Cases under bed, cases in outhouses hidden under sacks, cases sunk in ponds—even left on roads when the owners didn’t dare keep ’em. I must say I think somebody might have warned me, but they didn’t. I slid into Bosham with the engine just ticking over and my heart singing. I’d just dropped anchor when small boats with large men in them came upon me from every side. My heart left off singing and started sinking instead; I hadn’t a chance to make a bolt for it. I argued, but it was no good. The bottles even had the export labels on ’em, you know, stamped perforations.”

  Colemore came up for trial, but the result was a foregone conclusion and he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of three times the value of the goods.

  Chapter V. Short Life of Jean Legrin

  COLEMORE never disclosed the means by which he escaped from Maidstone Jail; he said he could not do so without incriminating friends of his. Van Drom in person picked him off an unfrequented beach in Kent at 2 A.M. of a moonless night and landed him in Holland. This was in July 1939, he having served only six months of his two years’ sentence, and already it was more than obvious that the Germans were stoking up the fires in Europe and that very soon the pot would boil over.

  “I ought to be in the Army,” he said to Van Drom. “I am more than willing to join the Army. But
if I go back to England for the purpose all that will happen will be a return to Maidstone Jail, and a fat lot of help that’ll be to the country. They’ll even have to board and lodge me, which they’re spared at present. Fancy me a bouche inutile sewing mailbags for the duration. I’ll bet the war would be over before I’d served my time.”

  “Cheer up,” said Van Drom. “At least your country will fight when the time comes. Mine is cowering trustfully in the shadow of Nazi promises and will be instantly gobbled up when it suits them.”

  “I’d join your Army if only they’d promise to fight,” said Colemore thoughtfully.

  “Even that inducement,” said Van Drom, laughing, “won’t persuade them to abandon neutrality, I fear.”

  “Ass!”

  “Oh, quite. But the French will fight. They’ll have to. If you must join an army, why not join the French?”

  “If I had some suitable papers,” said Colemore slowly. “That can be arranged. Since my country will not fight,” said Van Drom, “there are those of us who are making a few preliminary arrangements against the time when the Boche comes. The production of passable identity papers is of primary importance.”

  Colemore nodded. “There’s another point. Being an Englishman, I’ve never done my year with the colours as boys do in countries which have conscription. I can shoot, but arms drill—”

  Van Drom laughed. “You are—how old? Thirty-one? You would have done your year at eighteen. How many men, d’you suppose, remember their arms drill after thirteen years? Besides, there are several Frenchmen about still in Sluys; we will get one of them to give you a little coaching. The thing is simple.”

  It was. Calling-up and identity papers were produced, and Colemore found himself Jean Legrin of the 105th Chasseurs, now mechanized. He joined his regiment at Amiens in the middle of August 1939 and found himself the subject of highly intensive training. A fortnight later war broke out, but Hitler kindly allowed him another six months to familiarize himself with his weapons before hostilities really began in earnest. Van Drom had underrated his countrymen, for they fought like fiends against hopeless odds, treachery and sabotage when the Low Countries were invaded, and the 105th Chasseurs went into Belgium to try to stop the flood. At the end of May they were swirling round on the northern edge of the famous gap between Arras and Cambrai, with the Germans pouring towards Boulogne between them and the main French forces. The retreat to Dunkirk began.