Game Without Rules, page 1
Copyright & Information
Game Without Rules
First published in 1967
© Estate of Michael Gilbert; House of Stratus 1967-2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Michael Gilbert to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
EAN ISBN Edition
075510532X 9780755105328 Print
0755131916 9780755131914 Kindle
0755132289 9780755132287 Epub
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
www.houseofstratus.com
About the Author
Born in Lincolnshire, England, Michael Francis Gilbert graduated in law from the University of London in 1937, shortly after which he first spent some time teaching at a prep-school which was followed by six years serving with the Royal Horse Artillery. During World War II he was captured following service in North Africa and Italy, and his prisoner-of-war experiences later leading to the writing of the acclaimed novel ‘Death in Captivity’ in 1952.
After the war, Gilbert worked as a solicitor in London, but his writing continued throughout his legal career and in addition to novels he wrote stage plays and scripts for radio and television. He is, however, best remembered for his novels, which have been described as witty and meticulously-plotted espionage and police procedural thrillers, but which exemplify realism.
HRF Keating stated that ‘Smallbone Deceased’ was amongst the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. "The plot," wrote Keating, "is in every way as good as those of Agatha Christie at her best: as neatly dovetailed, as inherently complex yet retaining a decent credibility, and as full of cunningly-suggested red herrings." It featured Chief Inspector Hazlerigg, who went on to appear in later novels and short stories, and another series was built around Patrick Petrella, a London based police constable (later promoted) who was fluent in four languages and had a love for both poetry and fine wine. Other memorable characters around which Gilbert built stories included Calder and Behrens. They are elderly but quite amiable agents, who are nonetheless ruthless and prepared to take on tasks too much at the dirty end of the business for their younger colleagues. They are brought out of retirement periodically upon receiving a bank statement containing a code.
Much of Michael Gilbert’s writing was done on the train as he travelled from home to his office in London: "I always take a latish train to work," he explained in 1980, "and, of course, I go first class. I have no trouble in writing because I prepare a thorough synopsis beforehand.". After retirement from the law, however, he nevertheless continued and also reviewed for ‘The Daily Telegraph’, as well as editing ‘The Oxford Book of Legal Anecdotes’.
Gilbert was appointed CBE in 1980. Generally regarded as ‘one of the elder statesmen of the British crime writing fraternity, he was a founder-member of the British Crime Writers’ Association and in 1988 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, before receiving the Lifetime ‘Anthony’ Achievement award at the 1990 Boucheron in London.
Michael Gilbert died in 2006, aged ninety three, and was survived by his wife and their two sons and five daughters.
THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
Everyone in Lamperdown knew that Mr. Behrens, who lived with his aunt at the Old Rectory and kept bees, and Mr. Calder, who lived in a cottage on the hilltop outside the village and was the owner of a deerhound called Rasselas, were the closest of close friends. They knew, too, that there was something out of the ordinary about both of them.
Both had a habit of disappearing. When Mr. Calder went he left the great dog in charge of the cottage, and Mr. Behrens would plod up the hill once a day to talk to the dog and see to his requirements. If both men happened to be away at the same time, Rasselas would be brought down to the Old Rectory where, according to Flossie, who did for the Behrens’, he would sit for hour after hour in one red plush armchair, staring silently at Mr. Behrens’ aunt in the other.
There were other things. There was known to be a buried telephone line connecting the Old Rectory and the cottage; both houses had an elaborate system of burglar alarms, and Mr. Calder’s cottage, according to Ken who had helped to build it, had steel plates inside the window shutters.
The villagers knew all this and, being countrymen, talked very little about it, except occasionally amongst themselves toward closing time. To strangers, of course, they said nothing.
That fine autumn morning Rasselas was lying, chin on ground, watching Mr. Calder creosote the sharp end of a wooden spile. He sat up suddenly and rumbled out a warning.
“It’s only Arthur,” said Mr. Calder. “We know him.”
The dog subsided with a windy sigh. Arthur was Mr. Calder’s nearest neighbour. He lived in a converted railway carriage in the company of a cat and two owls, and worked in the woods that cap the North Downs from Wrotham Hill to the Medway; Brimstone Wood; Mole-Hill Wood; Long Corse Shaw; Whitehorse Wood; Tom Lofts Wood; and Leg of Mutton Wood. It was a very old part of the country and, like all old things, it was full of ghosts. Mr. Calder could not see them, but he knew they were there. Sometimes when he was walking with Rasselas in the woods, the dog would stop, cock his head on one side and rumble deep in his throat, his yellow eyes speculative as he followed some shape flitting down the ride ahead of them.
“Good morning, Arthur,” said Mr. Calder.
“Working, I see,” said Arthur. He was a small, thick man, of great strength, said to have an irresistible attraction for women.
“The old fence is on its last legs. I’m putting this in until I can get it done properly.”
Arthur examined the spile with an expert eye and said, “Chestnut. That should hold her for a season. Oak’d be better. You working too hard to come and look at something, Hound?”
“Never too busy for that,” said Mr. Calder.
“Let’s go in your car, it’ll be quicker,” said Arthur. “Bring a torch, too.”
Half a mile along a rutted track they left the car, climbed a gate and walked down a broad ride, forking off onto a smaller one. After a few minutes the trees thinned, and Mr. Calder saw that they were coming to a clearing where wooding had been going on. The trunks had been dragged away and the slope was a litter of scattered cordwood.
“These big contractors,” said Arthur. “They’ve got no idea. They come and cut down the trees, and lug ’em off, and think they’ve finished the job. Then I have to clear it up. Stack the cordwood. Pull out the stumps where they’re an obstruction to traffic.”
What traffic had passed, or would ever pass again through the heart of this secret place, Mr. Calder could hardly imagine. He saw that the workmen had cleared a rough path which followed the contour of the hill and disappeared down the other side, presumably joining the track they had come by somewhere down in the valley. At that moment the ground was a mess of tractor marks and turned earth. In a year the raw places would be skimmed over with grass, nettles, bluebells, kingcups and wild garlic. In five years there would be no trace of the intruders.
“In the old days,” said Arthur, “we done it with horses. Now we do it with machinery. I’m not saying it isn’t quicker and handier, but it don’t seem altogether right.”
He nodded at his bulldozer, askew on the side of a hummock. Rasselas went over and sneered at it, disapproving of the oily smell.
“I was shifting this stump,” said Arthur, “when the old cow slipped and came down sideways. She hit t’other tree a proper dunt. I thought I bitched up the works, but all I done was shift the tree a piece. See?”
Mr. Calder walked across to look. The tree which Arthur had hit was no more than a hollow ring of elm, very old and less than three feet high. His first thought was that it was curious that a heavy bulldozer crashing down onto it from above should not have shattered its frail shell altogether.
“Ah! You have a look inside,” said Arthur.
The interior of the stump was solid concrete.
“Why on earth,” said Mr. Calder, “would anyone bother—?”
“Just have a look at this.”
The stump was at a curious angle, half uprooted so that one side lay much higher than the other.
“When I hit it,” said Arthur, “I felt something give. Truth to tell, I thought I’d cracked her shaft. Then I took another look. See?”
Mr. Calder looked. And he saw.
The whole block – wooden ring, cement center and all – had been pierced by an iron bar. The end of it was visible, thick with rust, sticking out of the broken earth. He scraped away the soil with his fingers and presently found the U-shaped socket he was looking for. He sat back on his heels and stared at Arthur, who stared back, solemn as one of his own owls.
“Someone—” said Mr. Calder slowly, “—God knows why, took the trouble to cut out this tree stump and stick a damned great iron bar right through the middle of it, fixed to open on a pivot.”
“It would have been Dan Owtram who fixed the bar for ’em, I don’t doubt,” said Arthur. “He’s been dead ten years now.”
“Who’d Dan fix it for?”
“Why, for the military.”
“I see,” said Mr. Calder. It was beginning to make a little more sense.
“You’ll see when you get inside.”
“Is there something inside?”
“Surely,” said Arthur. “I wouldn’t bring you out all this way just to look at an old tree stump, now would I? Come around here.”
Mr. Calder moved around to the far side and saw, for the first time, that when the stump had shifted, it had left a gap on the underside. It was not much bigger than a badger’s hole.
“Are you suggesting I go down that?”
“It’s not so bad, once you’re in,” said Arthur.
The entrance sloped down at about forty-five degrees and was only really narrow at the start, where the earth had caved in. After a short slide, Mr. Calder’s feet touched the top of a ladder. It was a long ladder. He counted twenty rungs before his feet were on firm ground. He got out his torch and switched it on.
He was in a fair-sized chamber, cut out of the chalk. He saw two recesses, each containing a spring bed on a wooden frame; two or three empty packing cases, upended as table and seats; a wooden cupboard; several racks; and a heap of disintegrating blankets. The place smelled of lime and dampness and, very faintly, of something else.
A scrabbling noise announced the arrival of Arthur.
“Like something outer one of them last war films,” he said.
“Journey’s End!” said Mr. Calder. “All it needs is a candle in an empty beer bottle and a couple of gas masks hanging up on the wall.”
“It was journey’s end for him all right.” Arthur jerked his head toward the far corner, and Mr. Calder swung his torch round.
The first thing he saw was a pair of boots, then the mildewed remains of a pair of flannel trousers, through gaps in which the leg bones showed white. The man was lying on his back. He could hardly have fallen like that; it was not a natural position. Someone had taken the trouble to straighten the legs and fold the arms over the chest after death.
The light from Mr. Calder’s torch moved upward to the head, where it stayed for a long minute. Then he straightened up. “I don’t think you’d better say much about this. Not for the moment.”
“That hole in his forehead,” said Arthur. “It’s a bullet hole, ennit?”
“Yes. The bullet went through the middle of his forehead and out at the back. There’s a second hole there.”
“I guessed it was more up your street than mine,” said Arthur. “What’ll we do? Tell the police?”
“We’ll have to tell them sometime. Just for the moment, do you think you could cover the hole up? Put some sticks and turf across?”
“I could do that all right. ‘T’won’t really be necessary, though. Now the wooding’s finished you won’t get anyone else through here. It’s all preserved. The people who do the shooting, they stay on the outside of the covers.”
“One of them didn’t,” said Mr. Calder, looking down at the floor and showing his teeth in a grin.
Mr. Behrens edged his way through the crowd in the drawing room of Colonel Mark Bessendine’s Chatham quarters. He wanted to look at one of the photographs on the mantel-piece.
“That’s the Otrango,” said a girl near his left elbow. “It was Grandfather’s ship. He proposed to Granny in the Red Sea. On the deck tennis court, actually. Romantic, don’t you think?”
Mr. Behrens removed his gaze from the photograph to study his informant. She had brown hair and a friendly face and was just leaving the puppy-fat stage. Fifteen or sixteen, he guessed. “You must be Julia Bessendine,” he said.
“And you’re Mr. Behrens. Daddy says you’re doing something very clever in our workshops. Of course, he wouldn’t say what.”
“That was his natural discretion,” said Mr. Behrens. “As a matter of fact, it isn’t hush-hush at all. I’m writing a paper for the Molecular Society on Underwater Torque Reactions and the Navy offered to lend me its big test tank.”
“Gracious!” said Julia.
Colonel Bessendine surged across.
“Julia, you’re in dereliction of your duties. I can see that Mr. Behrens’ glass is empty.”
“Excellent sherry,” said Mr. Behrens.
“Tradition,” said Colonel Bessendine, “associates the Navy with rum. In fact, the two drinks that it really understands are gin and sherry. I hope our technical people are looking after you?”
“The Navy has been helpfulness personified. It’s been particularly convenient for me, being allowed to do this work at Chatham. Only twenty minutes run from Lamperdown, you see.”
Colonel Bessendine said, “My last station was Devonport. A ghastly place. When I was posted back here I felt I was coming home. The whole of my youth is tied up with this part of the country. I was born and bred not far from Tilbury and I went to school at Rochester.”
His face, thought Mr. Behrens, was like a waxwork. A clever waxwork, but one which you could never quite mistake for human flesh. Only the eyes were truly alive.
“I sometimes spent a holiday down here when I was a boy,” said Mr. Behrens. “My aunt and uncle – he’s dead now – bought the Old Rectory at Lamperdown after the First World War. Thank you, my dear; that was very nicely managed.” This was to Julia, who had fought her way back to him with most of the sherry still in the glass.
“In those days, your school,” he said to the girl, “was a private house. One of the great houses of the county.”
“It must have been totally impracticable,” said Julia Bessendine severely. “Fancy trying to live in it. What sort of staff did it need to keep it up?”
“They scraped along with twenty or thirty indoor servants, a few dozen gardeners and gamekeepers, and a cricket pro.”
“Daddy told me that when he was a boy he used to walk out from school on half holidays, and watch cricket on their private cricket ground. That’s right, isn’t it, Daddy?”
“That’s right, my dear. I think, Julia—”
“He used to crawl up alongside the hedge from the railway and squeeze through a gap in the iron railings at the top and lie in the bushes. And once the old lord walked across and found him, and instead of booting him out, he gave him money to buy sweets with.”
“Major Furlong looks as if he could do with another drink,” said Colonel Bessendine.
“Colonel Bessendine’s father,” said Mr. Behrens to Mr. Calder later that evening, “came from New Zealand. He ran away to sea at the age of thirteen, and got himself a job with the Anzac Shipping Line. He rose to be head purser on their biggest ship, the Otrango. Then he married. An Irish colleen, I believe. Her father was a landowner from Cork. That part of the story’s a bit obscure, because her family promptly disowned her. They didn’t approve of the marriage at all. They were poor but proud. Old Bessendine had the drawback of being twice as rich as they were.”
“Rich? A purser?”
“He was a shrewd old boy. He bought up land in Tilbury and Grays and leased it to builders. When he died, his estate was declared for probate at £85,000. I expect it was really worth a lot more. His three sons were all well-educated and well behaved. It was the sort of home where the boys called their father ‘sir,’ and got up when he came into the room.”
“We could do with more homes like that,” said Mr. Calder. “Gone much too far the other way. What happened to the other two sons?”
“Both dead. The eldest went into the Army: he was killed at Dunkirk. The second boy was a flight lieutenant. He was shot down over Germany, picked up and put into a prison camp. He was involved in some sort of trouble there. Shot, trying to escape.”
“Bad luck,” said Mr. Calder. He was working something out with paper and pencil. “Go away.”
