The Lost Naval Papers - Bennet Copplestone
The Admiral surveyed Dawson as if he were some strange creature from
an unknown world. "Mr. Copplestone is a friend of mine," said he
drily.
"Very likely," snapped the detective. "But is a man a white angel
because he has the honour to be your friend?"
"A fair retort," commented the Admiral. It happens that I had other
and better reasons. For in July I myself showed Mr. Copplestone over
the new battleship _Rampagious_, and after our inspection we both
lunched with the builders and discussed her design and armament in
every detail. So as Mr. Copplestone knew all about her in July, he was
not likely to suborn a draughtsman in November. See?"
"You should have told me this before. It was your duty."
"My good Dawson," said the Admiral gently, "you are an excellent
officer of police, but even you have a few things yet to learn. I had
in my mind to give you a lesson, especially as I owed you some
punishment for your impertinence in opening my friend Copplestone's
private letters. You have had the lesson; profit by it."
Dawson flushed angrily. "Punishment! Impertinence! This to me!"
"Yes," returned the Admiral stiffly, "beastly impertinence."
CHAPTER IV
SABOTAGE
Dawson showed no malice towards the Admiral or myself for our
treatment of him. I do not think that he felt any; he was too fully
occupied in collecting the spoils of victory to trouble his head about
what a Scribbler or a Salt Horse might think of him. He gathered to
himself every scrap of credit which the affair could be induced to
yield, and received--I admit quite deservedly--the most handsome
encomiums from his superiors in office. During the two weeks he passed
in my city after the capture--weeks occupied in tracing out the
threads connecting his wretch of a prisoner with the German agents
upon what Dawson called his "little list"--he paid several visits both
to my house and my office. His happiness demanded that he should read
to me the many letters which poured in from high officials of the
C.I.D., from the Chief Commissioner, and on one day--a day of days in
the chronicles of Dawson--from the Home Secretary himself. To me it
seemed that all these astute potentates knew their Dawson very
thoroughly, and lubricated, as it were, with judicious flattery the
machinery of his energies. I could not but admire Dawson's truly royal
faculty for absorbing butter. The stomachs of most men, really good at
their business, would have revolted at the diet which his superiors
shovelled into Dawson, but he visibly expanded and blossomed. Yes,
Scotland Yard knew its Dawson, and exactly how to stimulate the best
that was in him. He never bored me; I enjoyed him too thoroughly.
One day in my club I chanced upon the Admiral.
"Have you met our friend Dawson lately?" I asked.
"Met him?" shouted he, with a roar of laughter. "Met him? He is in my
office every day--he almost lives with me; goodness knows when he does
his work. He has a pocket full of letters which he has read to me till
I know them by heart. If I did not know that he was a first-class man
I should set him down as a colossal ass. Yet, I rather wish that the
Admiralty would sometimes write to me as the severe but very human
Scotland Yard does to Dawson."
"Does he ever come to you in disguise?" I asked.
"Not that I know of. I see vast numbers of people; some of them may be
Dawson in his various incarnations, but he has not given himself
away."
Then I explained to my naval friend my own experience. "He tried," I
said, "to play the disguise game on me, and clean bowled me the first
time. While he was laughing over my discomfiture I studied his face
more closely than a lover does that of his mistress. I tried to
penetrate his methods. He never wears a wig or false hair; he is too
wise for that folly. Yet he seems able to change his hair from light
to dark, to make it lank or curly, short or long. He does it; how I
don't know. He alters the shape of his nose, his cheeks, and his chin.
I suppose that he pads them out with little rubber insets. He alters
his voice, and his figure, and even his height. He can be stiff and
upright like a drilled soldier, or loose-jointed and shambling like a
tramp. He is a finished artist, and employs the very simplest means.
He could, I truly believe, deceive his wife or his mother, but he will
never again deceive me. I am not a specially observant man; still one
can make a shot at most things when driven to it, and I object to
being the subject of Dawson's ribaldry. If you will take my tip, you
will be able to spot him as readily as I do now."
"Good. I should love to score off Dawson. He is an aggravating beast."
"Study his ears," said I. "He cannot alter their chief characters. The
lobes of his ears are not loose, like yours or mine or those of most
men and women; his are attached to the back of his cheekbones. My
mother had lobes like those, so had the real Roger Tichborne; I
noticed Dawson's at once. Also at the top fold of his ears he has
rather a pronounced blob of flesh. This blob, more prominent in some
men than in others, is, I believe, a surviving relic of the sharp
point which adorned the ears of our animal ancestors. Dawson's
ancestor must have been a wolf or a bloodhound. Whenever now I have a
strange caller who is not far too tall or far too short to be Dawson,
if a stranger stops me in the street to ask for a direction, if a
porter at a station dashes up to help me with my bag, I go for his
ears. If the lobes are attached to the cheekbones and there is a
pronounced blob in the fold at the top, I address the man instantly as
Dawson, however impossibly unlike Dawson he may be. I have spotted him
twice now since he bowled me out, and he is frightfully savage--especially
as I won't tell him how the trick is done. He says that it is my duty to
tell him, and that he will compel me under some of his beloved Defence of
the Realm Regulations. But the rack could not force me to give away my
precious secret. Cherish it and use it. You will not tell, for you love
to mystify the ruffian as much as I do."
"I will watch for his ears when he next calls, which, I expect, will
be to-morrow. Thank you very much. I won't sneak."
"Remember that nothing else in the way of identification is of any
use, for I doubt if either of us has ever seen the real, undisguised
Dawson as he is known to God. We know a man whom we think is the
genuine article--but is he? Cary's description of him is most unlike
the man whom we see here. I expect that he has a different identity
for every place which he visits. If he told me that at any moment he
was wholly undisguised, I should be quite sure that he was lying. The
man wallows in deception for the very sport of the thing. But he can't
change his ears. Study them, and you will be safe."
Our club was the only place in which we could be sure that Dawson did
not penetrate, though I should not have been surprised to learn that
one or two of the waitresses were in his pay. Dawson is an ardent
feminist; he says that as secret agents women beat men to a frazzle.
Shortly before Dawson left for his headquarters on the north-east
coast he dropped in upon me. He had finished his researches, and
revealed the results to me with immense satisfaction.
"I have fixed up Menteith," he began, "and know exactly how he came
into communication with the German Secret Service." The contemptuous
emphasis which he laid on the word "Secret" would have annoyed the
Central Office at Potsdam. I have given the detected British spy the
name of Menteith after that of the most famous traitor in Scottish
history; if I called him, say, Campbell or Macdonald, nothing could
save me from the righteous vengeance of the outraged Clans.
"It was all very simple," he went on, "like most things in my business
when one gets to the bottom of them. He was seduced by a man whom the
local police have had on their string for a long time, but who will
now be put securely away. Menteith was a frequenter of a certain
public house down the river, where he posed as an authority on the
Navy, and hinted darkly at his stores of hidden information. Our
German agent made friends with him, gave him small sums for drinks,
and flattered his vanity. It is strange how easily some men are
deceived by flattery. The agent got from Menteith one or two bits of
news by pretending a disbelief in his sources of intelligence, and
then, when the fool had committed himself, threatened to denounce him
to the police unless he took service with him altogether. Money, of
course, passed, but not very much. The Germans who employ spies so
extensively pay them extraordinarily little. They treat them like
scurvy dogs, for whom any old bone is good enough, and I'm not sure
they are not right. They go on the principle that the white trash who
will sell their country need only to be paid with kicks and coppers.
Menteith swears that he did not receive more than four pounds for the
plans and description of the _Rampagious_. Fancy selling one's country
and risking one's neck for four measly pounds sterling! If he had got
four thousand, I should have had some respect for him. His home is in
a wretched state, and his wife--a pretty woman, though almost a
skeleton, and a very nicely mannered, honest woman--says that her
husband unexpectedly gave her four pounds a month ago. He had kept
none of the blood money for drink! Curious, isn't it?"
"It shows that the man had some good in him. It shows that he was
ashamed to use the money upon himself. We must do something for the
poor wife, Dawson."
"She will easily get work, and she will be far better without her sot
of a husband. She did not cry when I told her everything. 'I ought to
have left him long ago,' she said, 'but I tried to save him. Thank God
we have no children,' That seemed to be her most insistent thought,
for she repeated it over and over again. 'Thank God that we have no
children.'"
"I hope that you were gentle with her, Dawson," said I, deeply moved.
Long ago the wife had come to me and pleaded for her husband. She had
shed no tear; she had admitted the justice, the necessity, of my
sentence. "Can you not give him another chance?" she had asked. "No,"
I had answered sadly. "He has exhausted all the chances." When she had
risen to go and I had pressed her hand, she had said, still dry-eyed,
"You are right, sir, it is no use, no use at all. Thank God that we
have no children."
"I hope that you were gentle with her, Dawson," I repeated.
He astonished me by the suddenness of his explosion. "Damn," roared
he--"damn and blast! Do you think that I am a brute. Gentle! It was as
much as I could do not to kiss the woman, as your little daughter
kissed me, and to promise that I would get her husband off somehow.
But I should not be a friend to her if I tried to save that man."
So Dawson had soft spots in his armour of callousness, and little
Jane's instinct was far surer than mine. She had taken to him at
sight. When I tried to get from her why, why he had so marked an
attraction for her, her replies baffled me more than the central fact.
"I love Colonel Dawson. He is a nice man. He has a little girl like
me. Her name is Clara. Her birthday is next month. I shall save up my
pocket money and send Clara a present. I like Colonel Dawson better
even than dear Bailey." I tore my hair, for "Bailey" is a wholly
imaginary friend of little Jane, whom I invented one evening at her
bedside and who has grown gradually into a personage of clearly
defined attributes--like the "Putois" of Anatole France. Dawson and
"Bailey"; they are both "nice men" and little Jane's friends; she is
sure of them, and I expect that she is right. Children always are
right.
Dawson, after his outburst, glowered at me for a moment and then
laughed. "I am a man," said he, "though you may not think it, and I
have my weaknesses. But I never give way to them when they interfere
with business. Menteith is in my grip, and he won't get out of it. But
he is a poor creature. He handed over the description of the
_Rampagious_, saw it hidden in the sardine tin, and was ordered to
take the food parcel to the Post Office. The German agent who used him
had no notion of risking his own skin. Then followed the discovery and
the arrest of the draughtsman who had drawn the plan. Those who had
seduced Menteith forbade him to come near them. They slipped away into
hiding--which profited them little since all of them were on our
string--after threatening Menteith that he would be murdered if he
gave himself up to the police, as in his terror he seemed to want to
do. When nothing happened for two weeks, the vermin came out of their
holes, made up the last parcel, and forced Menteith to go to Carlisle
in order to post it. All through he has been the most abject of tools,
and received nothing except the four pounds and various small sums
spent in drinks."
"You have the principal all right?"
"Yes, I have him tight. The others associated with him I shall leave
free; they will be most useful in future. They don't know that we know
them; when they do know, their number will go up, for they will be
then of no further use to us. It is a beautiful system, Mr. Copplestone,
and you have had the unusual privilege of seeing it at work."
"What will your prisoners get by way of punishment?"
"I am not sure, but I can guess pretty closely. The principal will go
out suddenly early some morning. He is a Jew of uncertain Central
European origin, Pole or Czech, a natural born British subject, a
shining light of a local anti-German society, an 'indispensable' in
his job and exempted from military service. He will give no more
trouble. Menteith will spend anything from seven to ten years in p.s.,
learn to do without his daily whisky bottle, and possibly come out a
decent citizen. The draughtsman, I expect, will be let off with
eighteen months of the Jug. We are just, but not harsh. My birds don't
interest me much once they have been caught; it is the catching that I
enjoy. Down in the south, where I have a home of my own--which I
haven't seen during the past year except occasionally for an hour or
two--I used to grow big show chrysanthemums. All through the processes
of rooting the cuttings, repotting, taking the buds, feeding up the
plants, I never could endure any one to touch them. But once the
flowers were fully developed, my wife could cut them as much as she
pleased and fill the house with them. My job was done when I had got
the flowers perfect. It is just the same with my business. I cultivate
the little dears I am after, and hate any one to interfere with me; I
humour them and water them and feed them with opportunities till they
are ripe, and then I stick out my hand and grab them. After that the
law can do what it likes with them; they ain't my concern any more."
By this time it had become apparent even to my slow intelligence why
Dawson told me so much about himself and his methods. He had formed
the central figure in a real story in print, and the glory of it
possessed him. He had tasted of the rich sweet wine of fame, and he
thirsted for more of the same vintage. He never in so many words asked
me to write this book, but his eagerness to play Dr. Johnson to my
Boswell appeared in all our relations. He was communicative far beyond
the limits of official discretion. If I now disclosed half, or a
quarter, of what he told me of the inner working of the Secret
Service, Scotland Yard, which admires and loves him, would cast him
out, lock him up securely in gaol, and prepare for me a safe
harbourage in a contiguous cell. So for both our sakes I must be very,
very careful.
"You have been most helpful to me," he said handsomely at parting,
"and if anything good turns up on the North-East coast, I will let you
know. Could you come if I sent for you?"
"I would contrive to manage it," said I.
Dawson went away, and the pressure of daily work and interests thrust
him from my mind. For a month I heard nothing of him or of Cary, and
then one morning came a letter and a telegram. The letter was from
Richard Cary, and read as follows: "A queer thing has happened here.
A cruiser which had come in for repair was due to go out this morning.
She was ready for sea the night before, the officers and crew had all
come back from short leave, and the working parties had cleared out.
Then in the middle watch, when the torpedo lieutenant was testing the
circuits, it was discovered that all the cables leading to the guns
had been cut. Dawson has been called in, and bids me say that, if you
can come down, now is the chance of your life. I will put you up."
The telegram was from Dawson himself. It ran: "They say I'm beaten.
But I'm not. Come and see."
"The deuce," said I. "Sabotage! I am off."
CHAPTER V
BAFFLED
When at last I arrived at Cary's flat it was very late, and I was
exceedingly tired and out of temper. A squadron of Zeppelins had been
reported from the sea, the air-defence control at Newcastle had sent
out the preliminary warning "F.M.W.," and the speed of my train had
been reduced to about fifteen miles an hour. I had expected to get in
to dinner, but it was eleven o'clock before I reached my destination.
I had not even the satisfaction of seeing a raid, for the Zepps, made
cautious by recent heavy losses, had turned back before crossing the
line of the coast. Cary and his wife fell upon my neck, for we were
old friends, condoled with me, fed me, and prescribed a tall glass of
mulled port flavoured with cloves. My stern views upon the need for
Prohibition in time of war became lamentably weakened.
By midnight I had recovered my philosophic outlook upon life, and Cary
began to enlighten me upon the details of the grave problem which had
brought me eagerly curious to his city.
"I expect that Dawson will drop in some time to-night," he said. "All
hours are the same to him. I told him that you were on the way, and he
wants to give you the latest news himself. He is dead set upon you,
Copplestone. I can't imagine why."
"Am I then so very unattractive?" I inquired drily. "It seems to me
that Dawson is a man of sound judgment."
"I confess that I do not understand why he lavishes so much attention
upon you."
"Your remarks, Cary," I observed, "are deficient in tact. You might,
at least, pretend to believe that my personal charm has won for me
Dawson's affection. As a matter of fact, he cares not a straw for my
_beaux yeux_; his motives are crudely selfish. He thinks that it is in
my power to contribute to the greater glory of Dawson, and he
cultivates me just as he would one of his show chrysanthemums. He has
done me the honour to appoint me his biographer extraordinary."
"I am sure you are wrong," cried Cary. "He was most frightfully angry
about that story of ours in _Cornhill_. He demanded from me your name
and address, and swore that if I ever again disclosed to you official
secrets he would proceed against me under the Defence of the Realm
Act. He was a perfect terror, I can assure you."
"And yet he always carries that story about with him in his
breast-pocket; he has summoned me here to see him at his work; and you
have been commanded to tell me everything which you know! My dear
Cary, do not be an ass. You are too simple a soul for this rather
grubby world. In your eyes every politician is an ardent,
disinterested patriot, and every soldier or sailor a knightly hero of
romance. Human beings, Cary, are made in streaks, like bacon; we have
our fat streaks and our lean ones; we can be big and bold, and also
very small and mean. Your great man and your national hero can become
very poor worms when, so to speak, they are off duty. But I didn't
come here, at great inconvenience, to talk this sort of stuff at
midnight. Go ahead; give me the details of this sabotage case which is
baffling Dawson and the naval authorities; let me hear about the
cutting of those electric wires."
"It is, as I told you, in my note, a queer business. The _Antinous_, a
fast light cruiser, came in about a fortnight ago to have some defects
made good in her high-speed geared-turbines. There was not much wrong,
but her engineer commander recommended a renewal of some of the spur
wheels. The officers and crew went on short leave in rotation, a care
and maintenance party was put in charge, and the builders placed a
working gang on board which was occupied in shifts, by night and by
day, in making good the defects. When a ship is under repair in a
river basin, it is practically impossible to keep up the beautiful
order and discipline of a ship at sea. Men of all kinds are constantly
coming and going, life on board is stripped of the most ordinary
comforts and conveniences, there is inevitably some falling off in
strict supervision. Lack of space, lack of facilities for moving about
the ship, lack of any regular routine. You will understand. Just as
the expansion in the New Army and the New Navy has made it possible
for unknown enemy agents to take service in the Army and the Navy, so
the dilution of labour in the shipyards has made it possible for
workmen--whose sympathies are with the enemy--to get employment about
the warships. The danger is fully recognised, and that is where
Dawson's widespread system of counter-espionage comes in. There is not
a trade union, among all the eighteen or twenty engaged in shipyard
work--riveters, fitters, platers, joiners, and all the rest of
them--in which he has not police officers enrolled as skilled
tradesmen, members of the unions, working as ordinary hands or as
foremen, sometimes even in office as "shop stewards" representing the
interest of the unions and acting as their spokesmen in disputes with
the employers. Dawson claims that there has never yet been a secret
Strike Committee, since the war began, upon which at least one of his
own men was not serving. He is a wonderful man. I don't like him; he
is too unscrupulous and merciless for my simple tastes; but his value
to the country is beyond payment."
"But where in the world does he raise these men? One can't turn a
policeman into a skilled worker at a moment's notice. How is it done?"
"He begins at the other end. All his skilled workmen are the best he
can pick out of their various trades. They have served their full time
as apprentices and journeymen. They are recommended to him by their
employers after careful testing and sounding. Most of them, I believe,
come from the Government dockyards and ordnance factories. They are
given a course of police training at Scotland Yard, and then dropped
down wherever they may be wanted. Dawson, and inspectors like him,
have these men everywhere--in shipyards, in shell shops, in gun
factories, in aeroplane sheds, everywhere. They take a leading part in
the councils of the unions wherever they go, for they add to their
skill as workmen a pronounced, even blatant parade of loyalty to the
interests of trade unions and a tasty flavour of socialist principles.
Dawson is perfectly cynically outspoken to me over the business which,
I confess, appals me. In his female agents--of which he has many--he
favours what he calls a 'judicious frailty'; in his male agents he
favours a subtle skill in the verbal technique of anarchism. And this
man Dawson is by religion a Peculiar Baptist, in private life a
faithful husband and a loving father, and in politics a strict Liberal
of the Manchester School! As a man he is good, honest, and rather
narrow; as a professional detective he is base and mean, utterly
without scruple, and a Jesuit of Jesuits. With him the end justifies
the means, whatever the means may be."
"And yet you admit that his value to the country is beyond payment.
Dawson--our remarkable Dawson of the double life in the two
compartments, professional and private, which never are allowed to
overlap--Dawson is an instrument of war. We do not like using gas or
liquid fire, but we are compelled to use them. We do not like
espionage, but we must employ it. As one who loves this fair land of
England beyond everything in the world, and as one who would do
anything, risk anything, and suffer anything to shield her from the
filthy Germans, I rejoice that she has in her service such supremely
efficient guardians as this most wickedly unscrupulous Dawson. There
is, at any rate, not a trace of our English muddle about him."
"Ours is a righteous cause," cried poor Cary desperately. "We are
fighting for right against wrong, for defence against aggression, for
civilisation against utter barbarism. We are by instinct clean
fighters. If in the stress of conflict we stoop to foul methods, can
we ever wash away the filth of them from our souls? We shall stand
before the world nakedly confessed as the nation of hypocrites we have
always been declared to be."
"Cary," I said, "you make me tired. We cannot be too thankful that we
possess Dawsons to counterplot against the Germans, and that
personally we are in no way responsible for the morality of their
methods. Come off the roof and get back to this most interesting
affair of the _Antinous_. I presume one of Dawson's men was working,
unknown to his fellows, with the care and maintenance party, and
another, equally unknown, with the engineers who were busy upon the
gearing of the turbines. Many of the regular ship's officers and men
would also have been on board. Had our remarkable friend his agents
among them too? Everything is possible with Dawson; I should not be
surprised to hear that he had police officers in the Fleet flagship."