Page 38 of N or M? (Tommy & Tuppence 3)

Mr Grant asked no questions. He was content to sit quietly whilst Tuppence watched the speedometer in an agony of apprehension. The chauffeur had been given his orders and he drove with all the speed of which the car was capable.

Tuppence spoke only once.

"Tommy?"

"Quite all right. Released half an hour ago."

She nodded.

Now, at last, they were nearing Leahampton. They darted and twisted through the town, up the hill.

Tuppence jumped out and she and Mr Grant ran up the drive. The hall door, as usual, was open. There was no one in sight. Tuppence ran lightly up the stairs.

She just glanced inside her own room in passing, and noted the confusion of open drawers and disordered bed. She nodded and passed on, along the corridor and into the room occupied by Mr and Mrs Cayley.

The room was empty. It looked peaceful and smelled slightly of medicines.

Tuppence ran across to the bed and pulled at the coverings.

They fell to the ground and Tuppence ran her hand under the mattress. She turned triumphantly to Mr Grant with a tattered child's picture book in her hand.

"Here you are. It's all in here -"

"What on -"

They turned. Mrs Sprot was standing in the doorway staring.

"And now," said Tuppence, "let me introduce you to M! Yes. Mrs Sprot! I ought to have known it all along."

It was left to Mrs Cayley arriving in the doorway a moment later to introduce the appropriate anti-climax.

"Oh dear," said Mrs Cayley, looking with dismay at her spouse's dismantled bed. "Whatever will Mr Cayley say?"

Chapter 15

"I ought to have known it all along," said Tuppence.

She was reviving her shattered nerves by a generous tot of old brandy, and was beaming alternately at Tommy and at Mr Grant - and at Albert, who was sitting in front of a pint of beer and grinning from ear to ear.

"Tell us all about it, Tuppence," urged Tommy.

"You first," said Tuppence.

"There's not much for me to tell," said Tommy. "Sheer accident let me into the secret of the wireless transmitter. I thought I'd got away with it, but Haydock was too smart for me."

Tuppence nodded and said:

"He telephoned to Mrs Sprot at once. And she ran out into the drive and lay in wait for you with the hammer. She was only away from the bridge table for about three minutes. I did notice she was a little out of breath - but I never suspected her."

"After that," said Tommy, "the credit belongs entirely to Albert. He came sniffing round like a faithful dog. I did some impassioned Morse snoring and he cottoned on to it. He went off to Mr Grant with the news and the two of them came back late that night. More snoring! Result was, I agreed to remain put so as to catch the sea forces when they arrived."

Mr Grant added his quota.

"When Haydock went off this morning, our people took charge at Smugglers' Rest. We nabbed the boat this evening."

"And now, Tuppence," said Tommy. "Your story."

"Well, to begin with, I've been the most frightful fool all along! I suspected everybody here except Mrs Sprot! I did once have a terrible feeling of menace, as though I was in danger - that was after I overheard that telephone message about the 4th of the month. There were three people there at the time - I put down my feeling of apprehension to either Mrs Perenna or Mrs O'Rourke. Quite wrong - it was the colourless Mrs Sprot who was the really dangerous personality.

"I went muddling on, as Tommy knows, until after he disappeared. Then I was just cooking up a plan with Albert when suddenly, out of the blue, Antony Marsdon turned up. It seemed all right to begin with - the usual sort of young man that Deb often has in tow. But two things made me think a bit. First, I became more and more sure as I talked to him that I hadn't seen him before and that he never had been to the flat. The second was that, though he seemed to know all about my working at Leahampton, he assumed that Tommy was in Scotland. Now that seemed all wrong. If he knew about anyone, it would be Tommy he knew about, since I was more or less unofficial. That struck me as very odd.

"Mr Grant had told me that Fifth Columnists were everywhere - in the most unlikely places. So why shouldn't one of them be working in Deborah's show? I wasn't convinced, but I was suspicious enough to lay a trap for him. I told him that Tommy and I had fixed up a code for communicating with each other. Our real one, of course, was a Bonzo postcard, but I told Antony a fairy tale about the Penny Plain, Twopence Coloured saying.

"As I hoped, he rose to it beautifully! I got a letter this morning which gave him away completely.

"The arrangements had been all worked out beforehand. All I had to do was to ring up a tailor and cancel a fitting. That was an intimation that the fish had risen."

"Coo-er!" said Albert. "It didn't half give me a turn. I drove up with a baker's van and we dumped a pool of stuff just outside the gate. Aniseed, it was - or smelt like it."

"And then -" Tuppence took up the tale - "I came out and walked in it. Of course it was easy for the baker's van to follow me to the station and someone came up behind me and heard me book to Yarrow. It was after that that it might have been difficult."

"The dogs followed the scent well," said Mr Grant. "They picked it up at Yarrow station and again on the track the tire had made after you rubbed your shoe on it. It led us down to the copse and up again to the stone cross and after you where you had walked over the downs. The enemy had no idea we could follow you easily after they themselves had seen you start and driven off themselves."

"All the same," said Albert, "it gives me a turn. Knowing you were in that house and not knowing what might come to you. Got in a back window, we did, and nabbed the foreign woman as she came down the stairs. Come in just in the nick of time, we did."

"I knew you'd come," said Tuppence. "The thing was for me to spin things out as long as I could. I'd have pretended to tell if I hadn't seen the door opening. What was really exciting was the way I suddenly saw the whole thing and what a fool I'd been."

"How did you see it?" asked Tommy.

"Goosey, goosey gander," said Tuppence promptly. "When I said that to Commander Haydock he went absolutely livid. And not just because it was silly and crude. No, I saw at once that it meant something to him. And then then was the expression on that woman's face - Anna - it was like the Polish woman's, and then of course, I thought of Solomon and I saw the whole thing."

Tommy gave a sigh of exasperation.

"Tuppence, if you say that once again, I'll shoot you myself. Saw all what? And what on earth has Solomon got to do with it?"

"Do you remember that two women came to Solomon with a baby and both said it was hers but Solomon said, 'Very well, cut it in two.' And the false mother said, 'All right.' But the real mother said, 'No, let the other woman have it.' You see, she couldn't face her child being killed Well, that night that Mrs Sprot shot the other woman, you all said what a miracle it was and how easily she might have shot the child. Of course, it ought to have been quite plain then! If it had been her child, she couldn't have risked that shot for a minute. It meant that Betty wasn't her child. And that's why she absolutely had to shoot the other."

"Why?"

"Because, of course, the other woman was the child's real mother." Tuppence's voice shook a little.

"Poor thing - poor hunted thing. She came over a penniless refugee and gratefully agreed to let Mrs Sprot adopt her baby."

"Why did Mrs Sprot want to adopt the child?"

"Camouflage! Supreme psychological camouflage. You just can't conceive of a master spy dragging her kid into the business. That's the main reason why I never considered Mrs Sprot seriously. Simply because of the child. But Betty's real mother had a terrible hankering for her baby and she found out Mrs Sprot's address and came down here. She hung about waiting for her chance, and at last she got it and went off with the child.

"Mrs Sprot, of course, was frantic. At all costs she didn't want the police. So she wrote that

message and pretended she found it in her bedroom, and roped in Commander Haydock to help. Then, when we'd tracked down the wretched woman, she was taking no chances and shot her... Far from not knowing anything about firearms, she was a very fine shot! Yes, she killed that wretched woman - and because of that I've no pity for her. She was bad through and through."

Tuppence paused, then she went on:

"Another thing that ought to have given me a hint was the likeness between Vanda Polonska and Betty. It was Betty the woman reminded me of all along. And then the child's absurd play with my shoe-laces. How much more likely that she'd seen her so-called mother do that - not Carl von Deinim! But as soon as Mrs Sprot saw what the child was doing, she planted a lot of evidence in Carl's room for us to find and added the master touch of a shoe-lace dipped in secret ink."

"I'm glad that Carl wasn't in it," said Tommy. "I liked him."

"He's not been shot, has he?" asked Tuppence anxiously, noting the past tense.

Mr Grant shook his head.

"He's all right," he said. "As a matter of fact I've got a little surprise for you there."

Tuppence's face lit up as she said:

"I'm terribly glad - for Sheila's sake! Of course we were idiots to go on barking up the wrong tree after Mrs Perenna."

"She was mixed up in some I.R.A. activities, nothing more," said Mr Grant.

"I suspected Mrs O'Rourke a little - and sometimes the Cayleys -"

"And I suspected Bletchley," put in Tommy.

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