Johnny Under Ground Read online

“The usual thing. Words clipped out of newspapers and pasted on paper. It started with a piece of doggerel about Johnny Head-in-Air, whom I always imagined to be a character from a children’s rhyme. It then went on to tell me that my son had not died a hero’s death but had taken the coward’s way out by shooting himself in an air-raid shelter at Dymfield while intoxicated. That the police—which I presume means you—suspected this and were coming today to look for him; and that, if he were found, a most unpleasant scandal would result.” The umbrella made an ineffectual movement. “I dared not ignore it. I came here—risking a nasty go of bronchitis—and when you came, I did my best to stop you. I was not successful. I suppose it is now too late to appeal to your better nature? That is to say, does this matter have to be made public? Country people are very uncharitable, you know. There are—certain things, which I prefer to keep to myself. The spotlight of publicity at this stage would be intolerable—intolerable…”

  “And the telephone call?” said Henry. He was determined not to be moved to pity by the sagging shoulders and quaver in the voice.

  “That came this morning, just after the letter arrived. In case it had missed the mail, I suppose. Urging me to be sure to come along and stop you. Though how she thought I…”

  “She?”

  “Oh, yes. It was a woman, all right.”

  “Did you recognize the voice?”

  “Of course not. ‘I just rang to remind you,’ she said, or words to that effect. ‘Go to Dymfield and get rid of the police or you’ll regret it.’ I said, ‘Speak up, can’t you?’ And she repeated it, louder. Then I said, ‘Who’s speaking?’ But she’d hung up by then.”

  “Was it an educated voice?” Henry asked.

  “She didn’t drop her aitches, if that’s what you mean,” replied the Reverend Sidney tartly. “As to the extent or efficacy of her education, I am hardly qualified to judge. I wish you young men would use the English language with some semblance of accuracy.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Henry. “I was really inquiring about the aitches. I agree that ‘educated’ isn’t the right word, but…”

  “Mealy-mouthed,” said the Reverend Sidney. “Why didn’t you ask me if she was a lady? Because that’s a dirty word nowadays, isn’t it? We’re all ly-dees and gents, ain’t we?” he added, with a ghastly parody of what he probably imagined to be Cockney.

  “What time was this call?”

  “Must have been soon after eight. I was listening to the news.”

  “Mr. Guest,” said Henry, “I have to go now. I’ll be in touch with you again soon. Meanwhile, please don’t mention the letter or the phone call to anybody.”

  Guest gave a bark of sarcastic laughter. “Do you think I am likely to? I venture to suggest, sir, that it is you and your organization who are about to let loose the hounds of publicity.”

  “I promise I’ll do my best for you,” said Henry.

  “Ha!” said the Reverend Sidney loudly. He looked across the bright, windy wasteland of the airfield to the little knot of men and vehicles. Then he rammed a shabby trilby hat on his head and set off down the road at a sort of loping run. Henry got into the car and drove back to the airfield.

  They were waiting for him with some impatience. The experts had done their work; the pathetic remains had been assembled in a temporary coffin; and there was nothing except Henry’s absence to detain the group of officials in this drafty and depressing spot. Henry gave permission for everyone to leave, and promised to join them shortly at Police Headquarters.

  Left alone, Henry went back into the shelter. Chalk marks on the floor showed the exact position of the body and of the revolver. It seemed that Beau Guest had been standing with his back against the far wall, facing the entrance. The bullet had passed through his brain, and he had slumped to the ground, the revolver falling to the floor from his limp right hand. So it seemed. Who, then, had taken up the Typhoon on that patrol? Who had crashed with it into the sea? Who had answered Emmy’s radio call, and who had shouted “Tally-ho!” into the microphone with no enemy in sight?

  For a short moment Henry felt almost inclined to believe in ghosts. Then reason returned, and he remembered that somebody knew about Beau’s body in the shelter, somebody sufficiently alive to murder Lofty Parker before he had a chance to investigate Dymfield. Henry began to worry about what had happened to Emmy.

  Back at Police Headquarters he made another attempt to telephone to his home and to Whitchurch Manor. Once again there was no reply from either number. Scotland Yard informed him that Mrs. Tibbett had not rung. There seemed nothing to be done. Henry returned to his colleagues.

  Things were progressing as far as the formal aspects of the affair were concerned. Simmonds had reported by telephone to the Air Ministry and departed thankfully for London. A preliminary check with Air Ministry Records indicated that the insignia and medal ribbons on the rotting uniform tallied with those which Squadron Leader Guest had been entitled to wear. Information on the revolver and dental details were still awaited, as was the pathologist’s report. One bullet only had been fired from the revolver, and it had been recovered from the wall behind the body and sent off to the ballistics experts. A short and noncommittal statement had been issued to the press, stating that the skeleton of an unidentified man had been found in a disused air-raid shelter on the former airfield of Dymfield. No more.

  It was nearly eight o’clock before Henry and Sergeant Reynolds left for London. They drove straight to Scotland Yard, where Henry found an interesting item of information awaiting him. At ten o’clock that morning, it seemed, a Mr. Smith of Finchley had reported to the local police that he had received an anonymous letter in the morning mail. This letter now lay on Henry’s desk.

  The envelope was of the cheapest and least distinguished variety and bore a Central London postmark. Inside, words and phrases had been cut from newspapers and pasted roughly on a sheet of plain paper. The text ran:

  Johnny Head in air will be found to-day by Scotland Yard if you can’t stop Henry T from digging stop him talking or you will regret it you know what I mean

  The accompanying report stated that Mr. Smith had specifically requested that Chief Inspector Tibbett should be informed, and said he wished to discuss the matter with him personally. Henry studied the document carefully, and then put it aside while he wrote his reports. At nine he went to a pub around the corner and dined on beer, cheese sandwiches, and sausages. At half-past ten he went home.

  The Chelsea house, in which Henry and Emmy lived in the ground-floor flat, was in darkness. Henry opened the front door with his key, turned on the hall light, and then unlocked his own front door. He had no time even to switch on a light before the telephone started to ring. Henry picked up the receiver.

  “Tibbett here,” he said.

  “This is Vere Prendergast.”

  “Thank God for that. I’ve been trying to ring you. I’ve only just this moment gotten home.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you mean, you know?”

  “I’m speaking from the phone over the road. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  A small tremor of alarm ran down Henry’s spine. “Where’s Emmy?”

  “We’ll talk about that in a minute,” said Vere. “We have a number of things to discuss, you and I, my old clue-catcher.”

  “Where is Emmy?”

  “All in good time, old man. Don’t worry, she’s fine. But I thought it would be pleasanter for everyone if she was kept out of our discussions for the time being. Now, I want to talk to you. I’ll come over to your house, shall I, since I’m so close?”

  “I think you’d better,” said Henry grimly.

  “Good show. I’ll be right over.”

  Henry had no time to reply before the receiver was replaced. And he barely had time to make another quick call before the front doorbell rang.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  VERE LOOKED GROTESQUELY TALL, standing on Henry’s doorstep, outlined by the light from the stre
et lamp on the pavement. On each side of his thin face the bristling ends of his mustache stood out, catching the light, giving him the look of a rangy, bewhiskered tomcat.

  “Come in,” said Henry

  “Thanks, old man,” said Vere. He stepped into the hall. “I hope you don’t think I’m…”

  “I think nothing about you,” said Henry. “I want to know where my wife is.”

  “She’s with Barbara.” Vere looked at Henry, apparently with dawning understanding. “Good lord, old scout, you didn’t think…?”

  “I was simply wondering,” said Henry, “why she wasn’t home.” He opened the sitting-room door and motioned Vere to go in.

  “My dear old sleuth,” said Vere. “I’ve known Blandish since pre-history. I assure you I never had any designs on her then and I haven’t now.”

  “That’s hardly the point,” said Henry.

  “Isn’t it? It sprang to mind, if you know what I mean. No, I left Blandish and Barbara together. I thought it would be better if you and I had a quiet talk alone.”

  “Where did you leave them?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. What does it matter? In a club, actually.” There was a little pause. Then Vere went on, “I understand you went to Dymfield today.”

  “Correct.”

  “And you found—something.”

  “What makes you think that? Do sit down. A drink?”

  “No thanks, old boy.” Vere lowered himself into an armchair, and gave a sudden, loud laugh in which there was no trace of amusement. “No sense in beating about the bush. You want me to be the first to say it, so I’ll oblige. You found Beau, the poor old sod.”

  “We found a body,” said Henry. “It hasn’t yet been identified.”

  Vere looked at him with owlish shrewdness. “I get it,” he said. “Unidentified. Full marks.”

  “I said,” Henry pointed out, “that it hadn’t been identified yet. It certainly will be. The dental evidence will be conclusive.” He paused. “So Johnny Head-in-Air was Johnny Under Ground after all.”

  “Funny you should say that,” said Vere. “It’s just what I said.”

  “I’d like to get this straight,” said Henry. “You knew that the body was there. You and who else?”

  “Oh—some of us…”

  “All right. Tell me what happened.”

  Vere said, “I think I’ll change my mind about that drink, old chap.”

  “Whisky?”

  “Please.”

  Henry poured two drinks, handed one to Vere, and waited. At last he said, “Well, if you won’t tell me, I’ll tell you. Beau Guest died soon after five o’clock on the evening of October 13, 1943. He wasn’t even in flying clothes—which suggests something else, but we’ll come to that later. You took that Typhoon up and deliberately faked a suicide. You only risked one short remark to Emmy over the radio telephone, in case she recognized your voice in spite of the distortion in the mike.”

  Without a great deal of conviction Vere said, “What nonsense, old man. Duff gen. If I’d been in that kite I’d be good and dead now—full fathoms five in the drink.”

  “Oh, no. Your plan was quite ingenious, and the story stood up so long as it wasn’t investigated too closely. And it wasn’t likely to be. After all, Beau had disappeared, and you were demonstrably alive. What you did, in fact, was to make a big circle out to sea in order to jettison nearly all your fuel. You then flew in overland again, set the aircraft on an easterly course pointing downhill, and—please don’t tell me that’s not the right expression, because I’m sure of it, but I don’t know the jargon—and then you bailed out. No wonder there was a scare about German parachutists that evening. But the weather was bad and so was the visibility. It wasn’t unusual even for pilots bailing out over enemy territory to land unseen, so it’s not surprising that you got away with it. You ditched the parachute somewhere in the countryside and prudently kept away from Dymfield until the next day.

  “I dare say that, as Beau’s greatest friend, you had the job of going through his clothes and other possessions. It must have been a nasty moment when you found his flying boots. You’d forgotten all about them. Still, by good luck nobody else had seen them. You couldn’t very well dispose of them—they’re too bulky not to invite comment—so you quickly gave them to Barbara. That got them safely out of the Mess, and you knew she’d be leaving Dymfield almost at once.”

  “You’ve got no proof of all this.”

  “I don’t need any. The pilot in that aircraft was not Beau Guest, so it had to be somebody else. The list of possibilities is very short.”

  “Sammy Smith was an ex-pilot.”

  “Agreed. But he’s shortish and thick-set. It’s bothered me from the beginning—how Guest was able to fool the ground staff into thinking that he was you. In his case it would just have been possible. Sammy Smith certainly couldn’t have done it. In fact, of course, there was no question of having to fool anybody. The ground staff accepted the pilot as you for the very good reason that the pilot was you. Any comments?”

  “Not at this stage.” Vere leant back and sipped his drink. He seemed more at ease. “Do go on, old sleuth. It’s fascinating.”

  “So far,” said Henry, “I’ve given you the facts as I see them. From now on, I’m guessing. The question is—why did you do it?”

  “Let’s have your theory,” said Vere.

  Henry sighed. “I wish I didn’t distrust obvious explanations.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The obvious explanation is almost too neat,” said Henry. “You arrange to meet Guest at the airfield well ahead of the time for the take-off. You shoot him with his own revolver and take his place in the aircraft. Nobody questions the story of an heroic suicide.”

  “And my motive for this extraordinary action?”

  “I don’t think that you’ll deny that you were in love with Barbara even before she married Beau.”

  Vere smiled. “No, I don’t deny that.”

  “Well—there it is. You dispose of the husband and marry the widow. For many years all goes well. Even when the plan of writing a history of Dymfield is mooted, you have no objections, until the point at which the nature of the project changes. Lofty is too clever by half. He has smelled out a mystery connected with Beau’s death. He is planning to visit Dymfield. He is talking too much, to too many people. So he is silenced. After all, you’ve killed one man already. I’m told that the second time is always easier. I dare say that it seemed monstrously unfair that after so long the dead past should threaten your orderly life.”

  Vere nodded, ponderously. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you’re nearly right. I do realize that I’m in a serious position. That’s why I want to point out to you that your own is little better. There’s always a way around these tricky situations, you know.”

  “Is there?” said Henry grimly. “What do you mean by ‘nearly right’?”

  “Well, old man, you’re assuming that Beau was murdered.”

  “And wasn’t he?”

  Vere looked shocked. “Good God, no. He committed suicide.” There was a pause, and then he added, “The great hero, the golden boy. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “How he went to pieces. I knew him during the Battle of Britain, when he really was a hero. The rot must have started at Falconfield. I understand he was as tight as an owl when he crashed that kite.”

  Henry looked at Prendergast, and wondered. From his recent inquiries at the Air Ministry, he was now satisfied, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the crash at Falconfield had been caused by engine failure in the aircraft. In fact, he had been assured it was thanks to Guest’s supreme expertise as a pilot and his total disregard for personal safety that the plane had come down in the sea rather than in the main street of a coastal village. It seemed that somebody had been going out of their way to blacken Beau Guest’s memory.

  “Did your wife tell you all this, about Beau?”

  “Well…” Vere he
sitated. “People talked, you know. These things get around. And I myself saw him staggering about more than once at Dymfield. I think even Blandish noticed it, but of course she’d never hear a word against him.”

  “Please go on with your story.”

  “What else is there to tell? Beau found himself in a cleft stick. He’d made a public song and dance about taking up the Tiffie, and couldn’t get out of it without tremendous loss of face. On the other hand, he was dead scared even to take the thing off the ground. So what did he do? He simply went to pieces. He got drunk and then he sloped off to that disused air-raid shelter and shot himself. Not a pretty state of affairs. Some of us—his friends—decided to take matters into our own hands. That’s why I took the kite up.”

  “Your motives are still not clear,” said Henry.

  “My dear fellow, I was thinking of Barbara. Barbara and little Blandish—not to mention Beau’s old father and the honor of the old squadron, the one we’d served in together. A noble suicide is much easier to stomach than a squalid, drunken one, don’t you agree?”

  Henry said nothing.

  Vere went on, shaking a bony finger in the direction of Henry’s face. “Now get this straight, Tibbett. Blandish I don’t care about, but Barbara still believes in Beau and in his memory. I don’t intend that she shall be disillusioned. What you found today was a body too far gone for identification. A relic of an air raid in 1940 or thereabouts. Understand?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Henry asked, genuinely amazed. “Do you realize what you are asking me to do?”

  “Oh, I dare say it sounds a bit unusual to you,” said Vere, “but I’m sure you’ll agree with me once you’ve appreciated the alternative.”

  “What alternative?”

  “I’ll have another whisky, if you don’t mind.”

  Without speaking, Henry refilled Vere’s glass and handed it to him. Prendergast’s hands were trembling as he took it, so that some of the golden liquid spilled on his tweed suit. He said, “Yes. The alternative. You see, if it comes out that it is Beau’s body, then there’s bound to be an inquiry, isn’t there? People will want to know why he arrived at the airfield so early, and what he was doing in the air-raid shelter, and who saw him last, and all that sort of thing.”