At last the day--or rather the night--which we had been expecting came.
The sun had risen in a cloudless sky, and all day long had poured down a
fierce flood of heat and light. London was stifling. Everyone seemed
to be the victim of heat lassitude; tempers were decidedly short, and
even the most amiable of people seemed suddenly to have developed
raw-edged nerves. Added to all this was an uneasy presentiment of
danger; "There will be a big raid to-night," was the thought in the back
of everyone's mind.
In order to avoid arousing Mostyn Brown's suspicions that his house was
being watched, we had given up, apparently, all observation on the place
during daylight. But not in reality. In a house on the other side of
the Square, directly facing that occupied by Mostyn Brown, I had hired a
room on the third floor, and from the window, with the help of powerful
field-glasses, we could keep the house under the strictest watch. We
had not even to enter the Square to reach our tower of vantage, for
there was a back entrance from an adjoining street.
Towards this eyrie I had bent my steps, and on arriving I found Aubert
in a state of suppressed excitement.
"Look!" he said, handing me the glasses, and, taking them from him, I
levelled them at Mostyn Brown's room.
The ribbon on the parrot's cage had been changed to yellow!
But this was not all. The sun shone full on the window of Mostyn
Brown's house and his room was strongly illuminated. The field-glasses
showed us that Mostyn Brown was at home, a most unusual thing in the
day-time, and that with him was Blind Heinrich. How Heinrich had got
there we could not imagine. Aubert had not seen him enter. They were
seated on chairs drawn up to the table, and were poring intently over a
book, apparently making memoranda on sheets of paper. As we watched,
Madame Gabrielle, habited as a coster girl and carrying a huge basket of
flowers, came slowly along the Square, past Mostyn Brown's house and
round past the house in which we were seated.
I saw her flutter a signal, and, with her arm resting naturally on the
side of the basket, she rapidly tapped out a message with her nimble
fingers.
"Heinrich has been with Mostyn Brown for the past two hours," she spelt
out. "He came straight from Hereford Road and went into the next house
from the back." Evidently there was some way of communication at the
rear of the two houses.
I had now no time to waste, and, leaving Aubert and Madame Gabrielle to
keep the necessary watch, I hurried off to Whitehall, where I was soon
in deep talk with the astute and enterprising chief of the London
defences, a keen officer who by sheer merit had forced himself to the
very front rank in aircraft service.
"Good!" he said, when I had told him my news. "I think we shall give
them a surprise to-night. Perhaps you would like to see how we work.
Sit down for a bit." And he turned to his big table, on which stood a
telephone.
For the next half-hour I watched him, fascinated with his sure grasp of
London's intricate defences, and amazed, though I had thought I knew his
capability, at the swiftness and decision with which he issued what to
me seemed a veritable jumble of orders. To centre after centre of the
aircraft defences he spoke a series of numbers, so bewildering in their
speed and complexity that an enemy agent seated in the very room could
not have gained a scrap of information. Even to me, familiar as I am
with almost every branch of code work, it was a veritable revelation.
"I think we are ready for them now," he said finally, wiping the
perspiration from his face, and I could see that even to him the strain
had been severe. How well he had done his work all England was to know
the next day, though the public never even suspected the magnitude of
his task.
There was now nothing to do but wait; our traps were set, and it
remained to be seen whether the enemy would walk into them. I made my
way to my chambers for a few hours' rest and was soon deeply asleep.
At half-past nine Burton, my man, roused me. "The first warning has
just come in," he said.
I dressed swiftly and sat down to snatch a hasty supper, knowing well
that it might be many hours before I tasted another meal.
It was exactly ten o'clock when the report of the first maroon broke the
stillness, and London, with one accord, hastened to cover. Ten minutes
later the streets were deserted, and a midnight hush reigned supreme.
The great city seemed a city of the dead.
As we listened a faint, distant boom struck softly on our ears. The
strafe had begun!
Suddenly, far away to the eastward, a searchlight flickered up into the
sky; another and another followed in rapid succession, and soon the
entire sky was covered and chequered by dozens of wavering pillars of
flame, moving to and fro, methodically searching the heavens as though
moved by a single hand. Far above us I caught the soft purr of an
aeroplane, evidently one of our own, for the sound was quite different
from the deeper and rougher note of the Gothas.
Suddenly, with a deafening crash, half a dozen guns barked
simultaneously, and, looking out, I saw far away, seemingly caught on a
pencil of living light, the ethereal butterfly shape of an enemy
aircraft. A second later, in quick succession, came the unmistakable
sound of bursting bombs.
In the midst of the tumult a single tiny light showed for a moment far
up in the sky, just outside the ring of shrapnel that was bursting all
round the enemy craft, now hopelessly entangled in the beams of a dozen
converging searchlights, and, dive and drop as it would, utterly unable
to escape from the zone of effulgent radiance in which it seemed to
float.
Instantly every gun was silent! We caught the crackle of a machine-gun
far up in the air, and a moment later the enemy machine burst into a
lurid sheet of flame, and the blazing mass pitched headlong to earth
amid a roar of cheering from watchers, who in thousands had braved all
possible danger to see the aerial fight heralded by the outburst of
machine-gun fire. It was obvious that one of our sentinel aeroplanes,
perched far above the raider, had caught sight of him in the
searchlights, and, swooping swift as a hawk on his quarry, had sent the
Gotha a fiery run to the earth twelve thousand feet below. I learned
later that the Gotha had fallen in Essex, the three occupants calcined
to cinders in the flood of blazing petrol.
That was the extent of London's excitement for the night. It was not
until some hours later that I learnt that no fewer than eight squadrons
of Gothas, each consisting of four machines, had started out on their
errand of murder for London. Only a single machine got through, and
that now lay a heap of ruins. The rest had been split up by gun fire,
caught in the beams of endless searchlights, harried to and fro by a
vast concentration of British fighting planes swiftly assembled when the
warning of the yellow ribbon had become known, and had been relentlessly
chased homeward in utter disorder. Their repulse was a triumph brought
about by Colonel --'s masterly effort at organisation, when I conveyed
to him in Whitehall the news which had reached me through a simple
yellow ribbon tied to a grey parrot's cage!
Reports soon began to reach me in swift succession from my subordinates
in many quarters. Hereford Road, Harrington Street, and Lembridge
Square were being carefully watched. Madame Gabrielle and Aubert, the
latter dressed in the guise of a seafarer, were on the alert, with
dozens of other reliable agents, ready for anything at a moment's
notice.
Suddenly Aubert rang me up on the 'phone. I took up the receiver and
spoke to him for a few moments.
"Meet me at the corner of Harrington Street at five o'clock," I said.
We met in the grey light of dawn, and I soon learned that, with anything
like reasonable good fortune, we had in our hands the opportunity for a
great coup. Blind Heinrich had gone to the house soon after the "All
clear" had been sounded. He had been followed by Mostyn Brown, again in
the uniform of a special constable, and by five other men, one of whom
was the little fat man who had previously met Kristensten at Waterloo.
Now I had made up my mind that the little fat man was the intermediary
by whom the news collected by the other conspirators was conveyed
abroad, and it was essential that he should be caught red-handed.
Fortune had favoured us. He had been the first to leave the house, had
walked to the Queen's Road Underground Station, and, as we learnt by
telephone, had travelled to King's Cross. Here he was at present,
seated in one of the waiting-rooms, evidently intending to travel by an
early train.
Leaving the necessary instructions with regard to the conspirators still
in the house in Harrington Street, I accompanied Aubert to King's Cross.
The little fat man was still there, but just after seven he walked to
the booking-office and took a ticket for Peterborough. Just behind him
in the queue of passengers were Aubert and myself.
When the express pulled out on its fast run to Peterborough--the first
stopping-place--Aubert sat in the same carriage as the little fat man,
apparently profoundly asleep. I was in the next compartment, ready for
anything that might happen.
We were not much surprised when at Peterborough the little fat man
remained in the train, and so we continued our journey. When tickets
were examined, the little man paid excess fare to Newcastle, and my
hopes of an important capture rose momentarily higher.
Hour after hour the express raced northward, and in the afternoon we
came to smoky Newcastle, where we were to be the witnesses of a strange
_denouement_.
The little fat man, closely followed by Aubert and myself, made straight
for the docks. Here, in haste, he boarded a steamer, one of a service
which sailed regularly between Newcastle and Bergen. He was evidently
known, for he was greeted without question by the men about the decks
and promptly disappeared below. We followed, with several other
passengers, and very soon I sat in the captain's cabin, swiftly
explaining to "the owner" what had happened, and my suspicion of the man
who had just come on board with a freedom of movement which suggested
that he was one of the crew.
Captain Jackson was one of the men who have done so much to make the
North Sea service a model of everything that is implied in unswerving
courage and loyal devotion to duty. A fine, bluff, grey-bearded skipper
of the very best type, he cared not a rap for the peril of mines and
submarines which dogged him at every yard of his journeys. All he cared
for or respected was the Admiralty orders which gave him his chart
through the ever-shifting mine-fields; with those and his crew he was
ready to take his ship across to Norway and to defy the Huns to do their
worst.
His face grew grave and iron-stern as he heard my story, and, loyal
Englishman as he was, he instantly fell in with my suggestion for
trapping the scoundrel who was bringing disgrace on the good name of all
sailors by his infamous traffic with the agents of the enemy.
"George Humber is the name he goes by," said Captain Jackson, referring
to the man we had followed from Lembridge Square. "He says he is a
Swede and has Swedish papers. Let your French friend go below and help.
I'll see to it."
He called up the chief engineer, Andrew Phail, a dour, hard, bitter
Scotchman, who had followed the sea for forty years and cared for
nothing on earth but it and his beloved engines. If ever a man loved
his machines it was Phail, and if ever a man was loved and trusted by
his subordinates it was he. Hard though he was, his crew, with the sure
instinct of the sailor, recognised his sterling qualities, and would
have followed his lead through the worst storm that ever blew. Indeed,
the--was emphatically what is known among sailormen as "a happy ship,"
thanks to the captain and chief engineer, and I was not altogether
surprised to learn that Humber was the only discordant note among the
crew; for some reason the men disliked him, though he did his work well
enough.
An hour later, having taken our mails on board, we dropped down the Tyne
bound for Norway.
I learned from Captain Jackson that Humber had signed on some months
before, and had made a number of trips across the North Sea. He had
been in the habit of travelling to London each time the vessel reached
Newcastle, and at length this fact had aroused Captain Jackson's
suspicions, and he had made up his mind that this trip should be
Humber's last. It was, indeed, but the end came in a manner which not
even Captain Jackson's keen wits had anticipated.
In the meantime I knew that Aubert, a splendid linguist, who could play
many parts, from that of an idler in Paris to a worker in a munition
factory, was somewhere below in the engine-room, certainly not very far
from Humber, and assuredly very much on the alert.
An hour after we left the Tyne mouth I was standing with some of the
passengers on deck, watching some winking signals as our convoy appeared
out of the misty twilight. Of what the convoy consisted I could not
quite discern, but the Captain, before he ascended to his bridge, had
said: "Our friends will pick us up presently, and they will see us
safely across and look out for submarines."
The night passed without incident, and the next day proved grey and
windy. Ever and anon one of our patrolling airships paid us a visit,
while three other ships, forming our convoy, stood by, with their deadly
guns ever ready to talk in deadly earnest with any submarine that might
venture to show her periscope.
At ten o'clock that night I was on deck watching a series of strange
flashes of light showing in the eastern sky, when a sailor approached,
and informed me that the Captain wanted to see me in his cabin. I went
at once.
"Look here, Mr Sant!" the bluff old seaman exclaimed as soon as I had
closed the door, which he locked. "I've been rummaging the ship. Does
this interest you?" And he brought out from the drawer in his table a
bottle of medicine. It had apparently been recently bought from a
chemist, for it was wrapped up in the usual paper, which was still quite
clean and fresh, and sealed in the usual way. "This was found by your
French friend concealed in Humber's trunk. Your man would be up here,
only he is watching the fellow below, and as he is supposed to be on
duty his absence might rouse suspicions."
As Captain Jackson ended he handed me the bottle.
"It does interest me, indeed," I said. "If Humber were ill enough to
need medicine--and he certainly does not look it--he would hardly have
brought this all the way from London without opening it." And I thought
of the bottle wrapped in white paper which, on an earlier visit to
London, Humber had received from Blind Heinrich at Waterloo.
"I'll have a look at it, anyhow," I said.
My first precaution was to soften the sealing wax with a match, so that
I could unwrap the bottle without tearing the paper, and, if necessary,
so replace it that no suspicion that it had been tampered with should be
aroused. The bottle might prove useless as a clue. In that case we
should have to seek further, and to replace the bottle in Humber's trunk
in such a condition that he must inevitably see that it had been opened
would certainly arouse his suspicions and defeat our object.
I soon had the paper opened out. The bottle of medicine seemed genuine
enough. It bore the label of a well-known West End firm and the name of
Mr Humber. I tasted the contents.
"Cough mixture" was my comment, and Captain Jackson at once confirmed
me. "Humber never had a cough," he remarked reflectively.
"Now for the paper," I said, and began examining it. It was perfectly
blank, and I was experiencing a pang of disappointment when, catching on
the paper the reflection of the swinging lamp, I detected in one corner
a faint, glistening line. Lemon juice, I was confident.
Under appropriate "treatment" a number of neat figures arranged in
groups of three sprang into vivid prominence on the inside of the paper
wrapping. They ran:
123--5--8; 27--32--6; 46--23--11;
294--12--3; 18--1--8;
and so on.
I swiftly copied out the figures for safety, and handed the original
paper to Captain Jackson, who, on board his own ship, was, of course,
the supreme and unquestioned authority, and I wanted his full approval
and support to any action that might be necessary. The figures were
meaningless as they stood, but I had not forgotten old Heinrich's
systematic search for that odd volume of _Royal Love Letters_. I had my
copy in my bag and fetched it at once.
With such an obscure book as the key to the cipher there was no need for
any further elaborate precautions, and we hit upon the solution of the
difficulty at once. On page 123 the eighth letter on the fifth line was
"B;" on page 27 the sixth letter in the thirty-second line was "r"; and
in a few minutes I had decoded the word "Brixton." Going on, I found
that the message conveyed the news that Number 24,--Road, Brixton, had
been wrecked by one of the bombs dropped in the recent raid; that a man,
a woman, and two children had been killed. The spots where the other
bombs had fallen were accurately described, and it was stated that they
had done no damage beyond blowing holes in the roads and bursting gas
and water mains. Every word was accurate.
And the key to the whole problem was the mysterious advertisement for a
lost trinket in the _Petit Parisien_. That simple advertisement, so
apparently innocent, had announced to Blind Heinrich the enemy's change
of code! And without the book to which it referred no intelligence on
earth could have deciphered the disorderly mass of figures which lay
before our eyes!
"Well, I think we have got them now, Captain," I said, "and I am sure
the Government will be deeply obliged to you for your assistance. But
how am I going to get this fellow? If he lands in Norway he will be out
of our power."
"Come on deck," said Captain Jackson, with a laugh. "Don't make your
mind uneasy about that."
I followed him up the companion-way ladder to the deck, now deserted by
all save the steersman and the officer on watch.
"Come up to the bridge with me," said the Captain.
Although it was so near the period of full moon the night was dark, the
sky being covered by a dense mass of heavy clouds. Try as we would, our
eyes could not pierce the gloom, and we could see nothing a few yards
from the ship. Though we had parted company from the destroyers long
before, we were, of course, travelling without lights in view of
possible danger, and only the binnacle lamp shed a soft radiance on the
ship's compass. I was soon to learn, however, how closely we were
watched.
Captain Jackson entered the wheel-house and touched a key. From the
masthead above a signal lamp flashed intermittently for a few seconds.
Instantly from the southward winked an answering gleam, and Captain
Jackson turned to me. "That's a destroyer," he said, "and she is coming
up full speed."
For the next few minutes signals were exchanged with the racing
destroyer which was on our track, and soon I caught sight of the faint
glow from her funnels, and then the outline of her low, rakish hull as
she came abreast with us. At a signal from Captain Jackson our engines
stopped, and soon we were lying motionless while a boat from the
destroyer pulled rapidly across the gap which separated the two vessels.
A few minutes later a smart naval officer came on board with four men.
We were soon seated in the Captain's cabin, and I rapidly gave him an
outline of what had happened. His quick intelligence took in the
situation at a glance.
"I'll take your Mr Humber back with me," he said, "and you and your man
can come along."
But we were nearly to lose our man. As the officer and his men entered
the engine-room Humber caught sight of them. He started, but instantly
recovered himself. As the lieutenant spoke to Phail, Humber watched him
closely. I saw Aubert move noiselessly but swiftly behind Humber,
evidently ready for a tussle. A moment later Phail beckoned Humber to
come to him.
Instantly the spy's hand shot to his jacket pocket, and, as it came out,
bringing with it a revolver, Aubert sprang. The next instant the
revolver was on the floor and Aubert had Humber in a grip of iron. Ten
minutes later, with Humber securely handcuffed, we were on our way to
the destroyer, and were soon thrashing our way at top speed for home.
There is little more to tell. Humber proved to be a Swede named
Holmboe, and we clearly established the fact that he had been for a long
time acting as the travelling agent of the Berlin espionage bureau,
carrying information to Norway for transmission through the German
Legation in Christiania. The conspirators in the house in Harrington
Street were all taken into custody, and we soon had all the threads of
their activities in our possession, including the key to the mystery of
Mr Mostyn Brown, whose connection with various little affairs of
espionage was clearly established. Blind Heinrich, too, was at length
effectively unmasked, and, with the rest of the group, is now safely
under lock and key, with ample leisure to repent of the nefarious
business upon which they were engaged.
On this occasion, at any rate, the secret message failed to reach
Berlin, and I often laugh when I think of the amazement and anxiety that
must have been caused in the enemy's camp at the sudden silence of their
emissaries. To-day we can afford to make them a present of the truth!