The Satan Bug

biggest since VE day.'

'The ball's up on the slates,' I nodded. I watched Mary, her face expressionless and carefully not looking at me, button my shirt-cuffs — with both wrists bandaged and my fingers heavily scratched it was a bit much for me — and went on, 'Well, it'll certainly provide the British public with a conversational change from the football pools, what so-and-so said on TV last night and the latest rock and roll sensation.' I went on to tell him of what happened during the night, omitting my trip to London to see the General.

At the end Hardanger said heavily, 'Very, very interesting. Are you trying to tell me that you woke up in the middle of the night and — without telling Mary — started chasing and phoning around Wiltshire?'

'I'm telling you. The old secret police technique — and you can't beat it: get them at their sleepiest and most apprehensive and you're already half-way there. And I didn't go to sleep in the first place. I went without telling because I knew damned well it would go so much against all your training and instincts that you wouldn't hesitate to use force to stop me.'

'If I had,' he said coldly, 'you might have a full set of ribs right now.'

' If you had, we wouldn't have narrowed this list so much. Five of them. I let drop to all of them that we were getting pretty close to an answer and one of them was scared enough to panic and try to stop me.'

'You assume.'

'It's a damned good assumption. Got a better? For a starter I suggest we haul in Chessingham straight away. There's plenty on him and—'

'I forgot,' Hardanger interrupted. 'You phoned the General last night—'

'Yes.' I didn't even bother to look shame-faced. 'Wanted authority to hash about in my own way — knew you wouldn't grant it.'

'Clever devil, aren't you?' If he guessed I was lying there were no signs of it in his face. 'You asked him to check on this fellow Chessingham, his service career. Seems he was a driver in the R.A.S.C.'

'That's it then. Going to pull him in?'

'Yes. His sister?'

'She wouldn't be guilty of anything other than covering up for her own flesh and blood. And the mother is in the clear. That's for sure.'

'So. That leaves the four others you contacted this morning. You'd put them all in the clear?'

'I would not. Take Colonel Weybridge. The only certain facts we know about him are these: he has access to the security files and so would be in a position to blackmail Dr. Hartnell into co-operating—'

'You mentioned last night you thought Hartnell was in the clear.'

'I said I'd reservations about him. Secondly, why didn't our gallant Colonel, like his gallant commanding officer, volunteer to go into the lab instead of me? Was it because he knew the botulinus virus was loose in there? Thirdly, he is the only one without an alibi for the time of the murder.'

'Good lord, Cavell, you're not suggesting we pull in Colonel Weybridge? I can tell you we had a pretty nasty time from both Cliveden and Weybridge when we insisted on fingerprinting their quarters this morning. Cliveden actually phoned the Assistant Commissioner.'

'And got his head in his hands?'

'In a gentlemanly sort of way. He hates our guts now.'

'That helps. This fingerprinting of the suspects' houses. Anything turned up yet?'

'Give them a chance,' Hardanger protested. 'It's not one o'clock yet. Be a couple of hours before they finish tabulating their results. And I can't pull in Weybridge. The War Office would have my scalp in twenty-four hours.'

'If this lad with the Satan Bug starts chucking it around,' I said, 'there won't be any War Office in twenty- four hours. People's feelings have ceased to be of any concern. Besides, you don't have to throw him in the cooler. Confine him to his quarters, open arrest, house arrest, whatever you call it. Anything turned up in the past few hours?'

'A thousand stones and nothing under any of them,' Hardanger said grimly. 'The hammer and pliers were definitely the ones used in the break-in. But we'd been sure of that anyway. Not a single useful print in the Bedford decoy van. The same for the telephone box which was used to make the call to Reuter's last night. We've put your money-lending friend Tuffnell and his partner through the mill and had the Fraud Squad examine their books until we know as much about their business as they do themselves: we could have them both behind bars in a week but I just can't be bothered. Anyway, Dr. Hartnell is definitely their only customer from number one lab. The London police are trying to trace the man who sent the letters to Fleet Street, if we're wasting our time down here they might as well waste their time up there. Inspector Martin has spent the entire morning questioning everyone in number one lab about their social relations with each other and the only thing he has turned up so far is that Dr. Hartnell and Chessingham were on visiting terms. We already knew that. We're having a check made on every known movement of every suspect in the past year and we have teams of men checking with the occupants of every house within three miles of Mordon to see if they noticed anything strange or out of the way on the night of the murders. Something is bound to turn up sometime. If you spread the net wide enough and the meshes are small enough. It always does.'

'Sure. In a couple of weeks. Or a couple of months. Our friend with the Satan Bug has promised to do his stuff in a few hours. Damn it, Superintendent, we can't just wait for something to turn up. Organisation, no matter on how massive a scale, won't do it. Method number two, lighting a meerschaum and making like Sherlock, isn't going to get us far either. We have to provoke a reaction.'

'You already provoked a reaction,' Hardanger said sourly. 'See where it got you? You want more reactions. How?'

'As a starter, investigate every financial transaction and every bank book entry of everyone working in number one, every entry in the past year — and don't forget Weybridge and Cliveden. Let the suspects know. Then squads of policemen to every house. Search each house from top to bottom and have the searchers list every tiniest thing they find. This will not only worry the man we're after — it might actually turn up something.'

'If we're going to go that far,' Inspector Wylie put in, 'we might as well throw the lot of them in the cooler. It's one sure way of taking our man out of circulation.'

'Hopeless, Inspector. We may be dealing with a maniac but he's a brilliant maniac. He'd have thought of that possibility months ago. He's got an organisation — nobody in Mordon could possibly have delivered those letters in London this morning — and you can bet your pension that the first thing he'd have done after getting the viruses would be to get rid of them.'

'We'll try stirring things up,' Hardanger said reluctantly. 'Though where I'm going to find all the men to —'

'Pull them off the house-to-house questioning. It's a waste of time.'

He nodded, again reluctantly, and spoke at length on the phone while I finished dressing. When he put the phone down he said to me, 'I'm not going to waste my breath arguing. Go ahead and kill yourself. But you might think of Mary.'

'I'm thinking of her all right. I'm thinking that if our unknown friend gets careless with the Satan Bug there'll soon be no Mary. There'll be nothing.'

This seemed to be a pretty effective conversation stopper but after some time Wylie said thoughtfully, 'If this unknown friend does give a demonstration I wonder if the Government really would close down Mordon.'

'Close it? Our pal wants it flattened to the ground. It's impossible to guess what they will do. Things are only at the badly-scaring stage so far — no one's out and out terrified.'

'Speak for yourself,' Hardanger said sourly. 'And just what are you thinking of doing now, Cavell? If you'll be kind enough to tell me,' he added with heavy irony.

'I'll tell you. Don't laugh, but I'm going to disguise myself.' I fingered the scars on my left cheek. 'A little assistance from Mary and her war-paint and these will be gone. Horn-rim spectacles, a pencil moustache, grey suit, credentials identifying me as Inspector Gibson of the Metropolitan Police and I'm a changed man.'

'Who's going to supply the credentials?' Hardanger asked suspiciously. 'Me?'

'Not necessary. I always carry them around with me, anyway, just in case.' I ignored his stare and went on, 'And then I'll call again on our friend Dr. MacDonald. In his absence, if you understand. The good doctor, on a modest salary, manages to live like a minor Eastern potentate, everything except the harem, and maybe he discreetly keeps that somewhere else. Also drinking heavily because he's worried stiff, about the Satan Bug and his