They Tell No Tales

Manning Coles

Description

More adventures of Tommy Hambledon, that inconspicuous, deadly English agent who now goes to work on home territory to solve a series of English battleship explosions, followed by murder. Involved are a hairdresser, a governess, a wine merchant, and their affiliates. Close shaving for Hambledon, assisted by young Bellair, until the Nazi prime mover is qualified and nabbed...

Sujets

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

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Treasure Editions
• Date de parution: 11 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781774644836
• Langue: English

Extrait

They Tell No Tales
by Manning Coles
First published in 1942
This edition published by Rare Treasures
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
[e-mail]
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.

THEY TELL NO TALES


by MANNING COLES

Chapter I. Salute The Day

Hambledon woke up early, and switched on the light, blinking at the still unfamiliar room and listening to the unfamiliar country noises outside. A cart passed, iron-tyred wheels grinding on the frozen road; a cow lowed near by, another answered, and there followed the sound of unshod hoofs accompanied by the clatter of the farm-hand’s nailed boots; further down the lane a dog barked as the cows went by. At the farm itself poultry were asking loudly for their breakfast, the cowman whistled “Good King Wenceslas,” and the wind brought a loose trail of ivy slapping across the window. “England,” said Hambledon to himself, “English country again. I think I’m going to like if,” and he switched out the light and snuggled down under the bedclothes, for the morning was cold.
He felt no desire to go to sleep again, and lay thinking of the various things still to be done in the bungalow he and Reck had moved into two days earlier. A new washer on that dripping bath tap. The bolt was loose on the back door, it wanted a couple of screws. The kitchen was well fitted up though Reck wailed aloud at cooking over a coal fire instead of gas, a surprisingly good cook, Reck, considering all things. Of Reek’s horror at finding it almost impossible to buy cooked meat in any variety even in Mark, the nearest town, of his struggles with the broad Hampshire dialect of their daily charwoman and of the charwoman’s struggles with Reek’s German accent. A rug would be nice in front of the fire in the lounge, one of those long-haired black bearskin ones, but that meant going to London probably, might get one in Portsmouth.
Portsmouth, they were going there that evening to meet young Bellair, who had got hold of a foreman fitter named Macgregor from the Dockyard, with a story to tell. Might be interesting, that story; evidently Macgregor thought so since he considered Bellair not sufficiently important to hear it, and demanded a Higher Authority to whom to unfold his tale. So Hambledon had been sent down, not only, of course, to hear the Macgregor saga, but to look into the whole matter of these recent explosions on H.M. ships.
Bellair seemed a very decent fellow, one who bad several good marks to his credit with the Department. Hambledon and Bellair had met for the first time at the Admiralty two days previously, Hambledon had looked the younger man up and down and decided that he might do.
The last day of the old year, New Year’s Eve. At this time last year Hambledon was still in Berlin, though he knew the foundations of his life were cracking under him. Dear old Ludmilla had given a Sylvesterabend party full of worthy professors and their excellent wives, not an official reception but all Ludmilla’s friends, dear good people, if a trifle dull until he had the brilliant idea of making a bowl of punch. They drank to 1938 then, no doubt some of them tonight were remembering the Chief of Police and his revered Aunt, tonight they would drink to 1939 and hope for peace. Probably they would drink to his memory, bless their faithful hearts, saying what a nice funeral he had had and how movingly the Fuehrer had spoken of his murdered friend, whereas here he was if they only knew it, Tommy Hambledon still alive and kicking, and taking on another job. “I do take a lot of killing,” he said sleepily, and shut his eyes again.
In his little room across the lounge Reck stirred, opened his eyes and immediately looked at the luminous dial of the clock. Barely seven, needn’t get up for another twenty minutes, that awful woman never came before seven-thirty. Not that she would be so bad, presumably, if only one could understand what she said, though even Reek’s bachelor ideas of cleaning and sweeping were outraged by Mrs. Biggs’ methods. Speed, and speed alone, was her virtue. “I’m paid till twelve, and at twelve I goes,” she said, and rushed round the bungalow like a female tornado till the clock struck noon, after which peace descended on the house of Hambledon.
He found it very strange to be living again in England after all these years, he had expected to dislike it intensely, to feel lonely, homesick for the familiar streets and speech of Germany, an outsider, an exile; but already after only four months the old spell was regaining strength. He quoted to himself-he had taken to reading Kipling again-
“Beneath their feet in the grasses
My”-something-“magic runs,
They shall return as strangers,
They shall remain as sons.”
Of course, this downland country was not the England of his childhood; he was brought up in the flat Midlands where a gentle rise of fifty feet is called a hill, where men make wonderful hedges for the pleasure of the Hunts, where the lift of the sky extends in an arc of a hundred and eighty degrees from horizon to horizon, and the great companies of cloud appear and gather, pass, and fade again into illimitable distance, their green shadows sliding across the green fields. That was what he had remembered when in a distant country he had thought of England; four months in London had not changed the picture and here in Hampshire the high downs constricted the sky. Still, there was already something homely and lovable about this place, or there would be when the sun shone again, for during the last two days and nights the east wind had never ceased to blow.
“Another ten minutes,” said Reck and turned over, away from the clock-face. This job they had given to Hambledon should be child’s play after what he had been doing for years, but one couldn’t be sure. In Germany, people were unsuspicious because they were safe at home; here in England a German agent would fear everyone and trust no one, and men are dangerous when they are desperate. “Wonder what we’re in for this time,” thought Reck. “Start off all bright and easy and wind up in a burst of fireworks, I expect, as usual. If we bolt this time it’ll have to be America, I suppose,” He closed his eyes just for a moment and was awakened a quarter of an hour later by a furious banging at the back door.
“Donner und blitzen,” said Reck, “the Frau Biggs. Now she’ll be cross all the morning.”
Annie the chambermaid knocked at a bedroom door on the second floor of the King’s Hotel in Southsea. At an inarticulate sound from within she entered, put down the tea by the bedside and pulled up the blind, letting in a colourless ray of winter sunshine.
“Ten to eight, Mr. Bellair, sir.”
Bellair made a sound distantly resembling “Thank you,” and dived further under the bedclothes; Annie left the room and saying, like Reck, “Another ten minutes,” he lay still trying to remember a dream. Beyond the idea that it was something about a hippopotamus his effort was a failure and his mind turned to other things, mainly to the one subject which monopolized every waking hour, those explosions aboard H.M. ships. It was his job to find out who arranged them and how, so far the only step forward he had made was to get in touch with this fellow Macgregor and even he would not talk to Bellair. So Hambledon was coming down, primarily to see Macgregor, but actually to take over the whole enquiry, must be something pretty big if they sent down a fellow like that.
The explosions seemed to have only one point in common, that they always took place after the unhappy ship left Portsmouth Dockyard. The one odd piece of the puzzle was the swill-tub lorry which blew up just as it was passing out of the main gate. Most of the main gate went up with it and nearly a dozen men, including, of course, the lorry-driver who was literally never seen again. The “swill-tub lorry” was an ordinary 3-ton motor-truck, hired from a firm of haulage contractors in Portsmouth by a farmer in the Fareham district. The lorry visited the Dockyard daily to collect the contents of swill-tubs for the benefit of the farmer’s pigs, of which he had several hundred, all hungry. After leaving the Dockyard, it visited several Portsmouth and Southsea hotels for the same purpose and then went to Fareham to deliver the goods. It had done this regularly for upwards of two years without incident until Friday December the sixteenth, when with a flash and a roar which brought all Portsmouth into the streets, it blew up.
It was coming out, not going in. A saboteur might conceivably smuggle explosives into the Dockyard in the lorry, but why on earth should he smuggle them out? Materials for making explosives, yes, perhaps, but the materials of explosives are seldom dangerous in themselves until they have been suitably blended. Besides, this was no desultory flare-up, but a very high explosive indeed, in a confined space, in a word, a bomb. Why bring a bomb out of the Dockyard? And such a bomb! Fragments of debris had descended upon the United Services Recreation Ground.
Bellair sat up to drink his tea and thought of Hambledon. Who was Hambledon, anyway? Apparently he had a great reputation for dark doings in the Great War but no one seemed to have heard of him since. Hadn’t he been presumed dead, lost overboard off a destroyer or something? There was a story extant that some woman had asked Hambledon where he’d been all these years, and Hambledon with a perfectly solemn face had answered that he’d taken refuge from the storms of life in a Lamasery in Thibet, and there practised contemplation. The enquiring lady had stared, and said, “Not realty?” and one or two men had smiled. Evi