those passages which evidently gave him particular satisfaction. It appeared, however, that he was not wholly inattentive to our discussion, for he now looked up from his reading.
“I say,” he said, “this Welladay you’re talking about — is he the chap that Mike calls Wellieboots?” We confirmed that he was. “I used to know an Arthur Welladay during the war — bit of a pompous young ass — wouldn’t be the same one, would it?”
Ragwort extracted from the bookshelf behind him the latest edition of
“Well, I’m damned,” said the Colonel. “What’s young Arthur Welladay doing locking Mike up in cellars?”
“That is indeed, sir, a most interesting question,” said Ragwort. “We had at first assumed that Sir Arthur had simply gone — was merely suffering from the heavy strain of his judicial duties. But in view of the information which we have just elicited from Basil, it may perhaps be suggested that his conduct has more rational and at the same time more sinister motives.”
“I say,” said the Colonel, “you don’t mean Arthur’s the one who’s going round bumping off people who get mixed up with this Daffodil business?”
Thus simply and directly stated, the proposition was at once perceived by the young barristers to be patently absurd. Sir Arthur Welladay was one of Her Majesty’s judges and a member of Lincoln’s Inn. Whatever one might say to his discredit — and Julia at least would have been willing to say a good deal — one could not suppose him capable of killing anyone.
The Colonel looked slightly surprised.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “you can’t say that exactly, can you? I mean, he did the combined ops training at Achnacarry, so he damned well ought to know how to kill people. And you can’t say he’s never actually done it, because of course he has. Funnily enough, I think the first time must have been on Sark — I was there, in a manner of speaking.”
They stared at him, reduced to uncustomary silence.
“Colonel Cantrip,” I said, “I think that you had better tell us the whole story.”
The events which the Colonel now recounted to us had taken place towards the end of February in the year 1944. Though recently wounded in action in North Africa, he had been considered sufficiently fit to return with his unit to England, where expectation was general of the imminent invasion of Normandy. To his evident dismay and indignation, he had found himself incarcerated (as he regarded the matter) in a military hospital in Portsmouth.
“Pretty grim sort of hellhole it was too,” said the Colonel. “The matron had X-ray eyes and could smell alcohol at five hundred yards and the medical officer was a pigheaded Scotchman who wouldn’t pass me as fit until I could dance a Highland fling three times round Ben Nevis.
“So there I was, sitting around with nothing to do except try to make enough nuisance of myself to get chucked out of the beastly place, when Squiffy Bodgem rolled in, with two bars of chocolate and a bottle of whiskey. Old mate of mine — we’d been on the same training course at Achnacarry in ’41. We’d lost touch a bit since then — turned out he’d been Portsmouth-based for quite a while, running his own commando unit. Well, I didn’t think hospital visiting was much in Squiffy’s line, specially with armfuls of whiskey and chocolates, so I asked him what he was after.
“The gist of the story was that he’d got everything lined up for a raid on Sark in ten days’ time — him and another officer and four men. He’d been quite surprised to get the go-ahead for it, because we’d pretty much shut up shop for raiding by that time — saving everything for Normandy. But he’d managed to persuade the powers that be that Sark was a likely place for picking up a few odds and ends that might be useful to the intelligence chaps — or even a prisoner or two, which would be even better of course. Well, Squiffy thought he’d persuaded them — most probably they just reckoned it would be worth making a bit of noise in the Channel Islands and maybe bluffing the Germans into moving a few more men over there from Normandy. Whichever it was, they’d told old Squiffy he could have a go, and of course he’d been as pleased as Punch about it.
“Then he hit a snag. The idea was, you see, to hitch a lift down there on a naval submarine, get as close in as the sub could take them, and finish the journey in a collapsible landing craft. In some places that would leave you with not much to worry about from the point of view of inshore navigation — just get the Navy to point you towards land and Bob’s your uncle. Sark’s a bit different — dodgy currents and a lot of nasty rocks where you wouldn’t expect them, so if you’re landing a boat there in the dark, it’s better to know your way about a bit. No problem for Squiffy, though, because he’d got a Guernsey lad in his unit who’d been a fisherman before the war — got out the month before the Germans landed — and knew the Sark coast like the back of his hand. Then the Guernsey lad goes and makes a nonsense of a parachute jump in some training exercise and puts himself out of action, and there’s Squiffy with no navigator.
“He was just wondering if he was going to have to call the whole thing off when someone told him about me being in Portsmouth locked up in the hellhole. He remembered me telling him I’d once spent my school holidays on Sark and done a bit of sailing there, and he thought I sounded like the answer to a maiden’s prayer. He was a bit downhearted at first when he found I still had a leg in plaster, but I pointed out that if I was only navigating I wouldn’t need to do any climbing, so it didn’t make any odds.”
“You hadn’t mentioned,” said Selena, “that your leg was still in plaster. That may perhaps explain the reluctance of the medical officer to pass you as fit.”
“if he hadn’t been so blasted pigheaded, he’d have taken it out of plaster,” said the Colonel. “Anyway, apart from that I was as fit as a flea, so I told Squiffy to count me in on the party, He wanted to make it all official to start with — you know, have me seconded to his unit for the purposes of the operation — but I talked him out of that. ‘Squiffy,’ I said, ‘once we start putting things in writing and signing them in triplicate, what’s going to happen? You know what’s going to happen,’ I said. It’s all going to end up on some chaps desk in War House. And what are the chaps in War House there for? They’re there to find out if any of us have got a bit of fun lined up and put the kybosh on it. If you try to make it official, you can kiss good-bye to me as a navigator, and probably the whole operation. Squiffy,’ I said, ‘don’t do it.’ He saw the sense of it in the end, so I stayed unofficial. Never stir up trouble when you don’t have to, that’s my motto,” said the Colonel virtuously.
Ragwort blinked.
“I managed to sneak out for a couple of training sessions, and that’s when I met young Welladay — he was the other officer in the party. Nice enough lad, just coming up to nineteen and still pretty wet behind the ears — Squiffy was taking him along on this raid to give him a chance to see a bit of life. Terribly keen and serious he was — would keep on about freedom and justice and all that and saying that was why we’d all volunteered for combined ops. I told him I’d done it for the extra thirteen bob a day and the chance of getting eggs for breakfast, but he went all pink round the edges and wouldn’t believe me. So in the end I had to biff him, and after that we got on all right.”
“Oh dear, Colonel,” said Julia, in despairing protest.
Touched by this womanly remonstrance, the Colonel patted her hand.
“The trip down on the submarine was a bit dreary of course — stuffy and smelly and no room to move, you know what submarines are like — and I can’t say young Arthur did much to brighten things up. I was telling Squiffy about my getaway from the hellhole — you know, dodging Matron and the M.O. and giving the chap in the next bed a yarn to spin them when they noticed I was missing — and blow me if Arthur didn’t get in a flap about it. He’d known I was unofficial, of course, but he hadn’t known I was as unofficial as all that, and he started worrying about whether going AWOL from the hellhole made me a deserter within the meaning of subparagraph something or other of paragraph whatever-it-was of
“I told him if we got back all right they probably wouldn’t shoot me for it, and if we didn’t, getting shot for desertion was going to be the least of my worries, but it didn’t do any good. We were in the blasted sub for the best part of eighteen hours, and he went on about it the whole time, except when we were asleep — I daresay he dreamed about it as well. Nice enough lad, you see, but not a lot of sense.
“The sub came up about a mile off Sark around two in the morning. We got our gear together, blacked up with boot polish, and transferred to the landing craft. The skipper made a few dirty cracks about my chances of finding the right beach — the Navy never think anyone else knows how to navigate — and I told him we’d be back by six and expecting a decent breakfast.
