With Intent to Deceive

Manning Coles

Description

Crime Club classic with Scotland Yard on one side, a sinister gang on the other and the novel's Tommy Hambledon right in the middle in this, his first post-war adventure.

Sujets

• Policier & Thriller
• Thriller
• Fiction
• Espionage
• Thrillers

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 12 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774641026
• Langue: English

Extrait

With Intent to Deceive
by Manning Coles

First published in 1947
This edition published by Rare Treasures
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review



























WITH INTENT TO DECEIVE


by Manning Coles
To Kenneth Carney
of the police department
for his guidance through the intricacies
of police procedure

Cast of Characters
James Hyde. A fifty-year-old retired tanner who longs for adventure.
Hugh Selkirk. A British subject who has long lived in Argentina. He and James Hyde bear a striking resemblance to one another.
Robert Adam. Selkirk’s very resourceful manservant.
Alexander Nairn. James Hyde’s solicitor.
Mrs. Watson. Hyde’s repressive housekeeper.
Ribbentrop. The Nazi whose stolen treasure started it all. He had several hundred thousand pounds stashed in an Argentine bank.
Bill Dodds. A plainclothes detective with an observant brother-in-law.
Manuel Varsoni. A member of the notorious Gatello gang. Italian by birth, he and the other members have been living in Argentina, with designs on the Ribbentrop loot.
Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon. A British intelligence agent.
Chief-Inspector Bagshott. Of New Scotland Yard, a friend of Tommy’s.
Walter Race. Hyde’s weaselly cousin, his only living relative.
William Forgan. A modelmaker who has a shop on the Clerkenwell Road.
Archibald Henry Campbell. Forgan’s partner. Both are friends of Adam’s.
Pietro Gatello, Giuseppe Mantani, Angelo Gatelo, Ramon Jacaro, Pacorro Pagote, Cesar Mariposa, and Tadeo El Caballero. The other members of the Gatello gang.
Konrad Hommelhoff. Another Nazi, with designs on Ribbentrop’s loot.
Plus assorted servants, landlords, neighbors, and police personnel.






Chapter One. Hyde for Leather
When James Hyde was a very small boy, he learned from his father to pause by the landing window on the way down to breakfast and sniff the morning breeze; when it brought with it a certain acrid tang it meant rain, for the wind was in the west. It was some time before he learned with surprise that the west wind did not smell like that always and everywhere, and that the scent was not, as it were, intrinsically west, but actually tannery. What is more, the faint aroma which hung about his father’s clothes when he returned home in the evenings had the same origin, for old Tom Hyde was a tanner like his father before him, and intensely proud of a long-established and respectable family business. When James was six years old, which was in 1901, he was taken as a birthday treat, in the high dogcart his father always drove, to visit the works for the first time. The wind was in the west that day, and as they clattered through the streets of Yeovil the smell grew steadily till, when they swung through the yard gates, it was as strong as a sheet of color and nearly tangible.
When the dogcart pulled up at the office door James was lifted down to be introduced to elderly men who said, “So this is the young master. Well, well,” and beamed upon him. James was dumb with embarrassment, for he was a shy child; he stared about him because it was easier to look at strange things than strange people, and the men laughed and said it was plain to see he was one of the noticing kind. After which he was taken through queer sheds with large tanks in the floor where skins lay soaking in dark liquid, across yards where more skins hung upon wooden frames to dry. There was a great barn filled with rough bark piled up and giving off a pleasant woodland smell.
“Oak bark, my boy,” said Tom Hyde. “That’s what we tan the hides with. We soak the bark in water to make tan liquor, very like the way your mother makes tea in the teapot. Then we soak the hides in the liquor; you saw that going on in those sheds with the tanks in the floor. When they come out of that they’re nearly leather. Understand?”
James nodded silently.
“Not got a lot to say, has ’e?” said the foreman. “One of them as thinks a lot, like the parrot.”
“Rather overcome by so much novelty I fancy,” said his father. “Chatters like a magpie at home, don’t you, James? Well, what d’you think of it all now you’ve been all round? Eh?”
“It’s—it’s a very loud smell, isn’t it?” said James, and was half pleased and half abashed to find he had said something funny.
“Very healthy smell, my boy. That’s why we all live so long, we Hydes. Never get consumption when you work in a tannery.”
There followed many other visits to the tannery as time went on; the high dogcart was laid aside for a car, and James went to school where the boys called him Sixpence because his father was a tanner and he would be one himself when he was old enough. He thought it strange that his mother would never visit the works; his father made excuses for her: the smell was too strong, the works were no place for a lady, she was not well enough to stand about or tramp from place to place. James pitied her for missing a treat and was dumbfounded when he learned that she hated the place. She was large and placid, completely devoted to her husband and the one child of their middle-aged marriage, but she would have no contact with the business. James discovered by degrees that she was a very innocent snob and amused herself by believing that the Hyde family was once great and had tragically fallen in the social scale. “My husband’s ill-starred forbears,” she would say, and glance sadly at purchased engravings of the saturnine faces of Laurence Hyde, Charles Il’s Rochester, and of the prim lawyer whose daughter was the wife of a Stuart and the mother of two queens of England. Tom Hyde laughed at her without unkindness and even allowed her to christen their son James Clarendon. “ ‘What’s in a name?’ “ he quoted, feeling quite cultured for once. “She could have called you Shakespeare Tudor if she wanted to. I fear I am a sore trial to your mother. Women cherish these pretty ideas, boy, but men have no time to waste on them.”
“Isn’t it true, then?” said James timidly.
“True? Lord, no. My grandfather was a journeyman harness maker who married the tanner’s daughter, wise man. My father always said the name of Hyde was a nickname because he dealt in ’em, I don’t know. Nor care. It’s a good name now, with a sound reputation for fair dealing, that’s all I trouble about.”
James left school and went into the business with a good deal of young enthusiasm. He had ideas about advertising; he invented slogans, “Hyde for Leather,” “Say Leather, Say Hyde,” and was immensely proud when they were printed on the billheads. There was a harness-making shop attached to the tannery; when harness declined in fashion and orders fell off, James persuaded his father to start a factory for fancy leatherwork: handbags, belts, wallets, and so forth. This succeeded, and another factory was opened to make luggage. James discovered a strain of his mother’s romance developing in him at the sight of long shelves full of kit bags, Gladstone bags, cabin trunks, suitcases, and fitted dressing cases, ready to be taken down and go all over the world on errands of peace and war. War Office contracts for Sam Browne belts and leather equipment… . Sometimes luggage would come back to be repaired, plastered over with colorful labels from marvelous hotels beside dazzling blue seas.
James grew fidgety. Surely the world was full of marvels, and the years went by without his seeing any of them or going anywhere. One could not count the decorous annual fortnight spent at Eastbourne with an aging mother increasingly dependent upon him and still depreciatory of the noisome tannery. “I always wished you to enter one of the learned professions, my dear. A lawyer, perhaps; it is in your blood, you know.”
“It may be in my blood, Mother,” laughed James, “but I’m sure it isn’t in my head. You want brains to be a lawyer.”
“That may be. But I didn’t want you to spend your whole life being a tanner. Now, suppose you were to stand for Parliament—”
James Hyde was beginning to think that he, too, disliked the idea of a whole life as a tanner. But old Tom Hyde, who had been forty-seven when his son was born, now leaned heavily upon him. As the old man’s physical strength abated his strong will increased. James was trusted and beloved but also kept under and made to work, work, and keep on working. Since he was a key man in an important industry, even two world wars failed to open the doors of his prison. It was still a private business; no nonsense about a Limited Company for old Hyde, with annual meetings of shareholders telling him how to conduct his affairs, no. Never. It was much easier to keep a tight hand over the business himself and tell James what he ought to do, even after the old man became too infirm to go down to the office every day.
James’s mother died in her sleep one night early in 1940, before the air raids became severe, before she had time even to miss the annual visit to an Eastbourne spoilt by barbed wire and mysterious defense works. She died, and James was still a tanner. He was getting very tired of it, but there in the background old Hyde remained, like a rock half submerged by the rising tide of years, but still hard and obstinate. “James, bring the order books home tonight, we must go through them. James, show me that contract before you sign it. James, have you answered that letter from Harrods? James—”
And James controlled himself till he thought he would never be able to relax even if the chance came. “Yes, Father, I’ll see to it.” He wondered sometimes whether his mother’s spoof genealogies and borrowed heraldry were to her a means of escape from the same bondage in which he served; he wished he could believe in them also. If he