It was fingerprints that put them onto me, but it was the two useless guns that told them where to look for me. The police identified them as theatrical props, routed people out of bed to check out various prop departments, and had them connected to Nigel in no time at all. I was beginning to appreciate why Scotland Yard enjoyed its extraordinary reputation. But not even the best police force on earth can cope with dumb luck, which was why I was in Portsmouth instead of jail.
Someone knocked on the lavatory door. I grunted in-articulately and went on reading. According to both articles, I was a Jacobite fanatic and known terrorist, and a variety of odd theories were advanced as probable explanations of my connection with Arthur Hook (alias Smythe-Carson, alias Wyndham-Jones). He had an interesting criminal record and I’m sure no one much regretted his death, but this didn’t mean they weren’t interested in getting their hands on his killer. All air and sea ports were being watched, all ticket offices had been circularized. Special attention was being paid to the Scottish border in view of my Jacobite connections.
This last bothered me. If I was going to get out of England, I was going to need help, and other members of the Jacobite League seemed like my best chance. They share my hope of chasing Betty Battenberg off the throne and restoring the venerable House of Stuart. There were any number of loyal men in the Scottish Highlands who would have sheltered me, but it looked as though that was precisely where the Yard would look first.
Another knock at the door. I folded the papers, grunted again, gave the loo an unnecessary flush, and sidled out of the door to keep the room’s new occupant from seeing my face. It was wasted effort; he was far more interested in the room than in its previous tenant, and I walked on through the pub and out into the street.
The Jacobites were out, I decided. And now that Nigel had been picked up, the Flat-Earth people might well be under surveillance. Even if this weren’t the case, I couldn’t quite see running to them now. A man has to be something of a nonconformist to uphold the theory that the earth is flat, but this does not imply his readiness to grant sanctuary to a murderer.
I had to find some political extremists, and I had to go somewhere close, and I had to deal with people who were in the habit of traveling from one country to another without going through customs. Of course I could use my passport once I was well out of England, but-
The hell I could. It was in my jacket pocket, and my jacket, when last seen, was in Nigel’s living room.
I found another pub. There were only a few drinkers in it, and none of them had newspapers. I ordered a double scotch and a pint of bitter, remembering to put on an Irish accent. People almost always hear discrepancies between one’s speech and their own, so the trick is to give them an alternative set of discrepancies. If I had tried an approximation of the local speech I would have sounded American. This way I merely sounded Irish, which was unusual enough to be noticed but not likely to be long remembered.
I thought of trying some IRA friends. I knew some names and addresses in Liverpool and one in Manchester, plus any number in Ireland. But Ireland was an ocean away, and the few in England were still a good distance from Portsmouth.
Oh, of course. The CSU.
While auto theft is not as exclusively American a crime as kidnaping, it remains generally rare in England. Even in London few drivers take the trouble to lock their cars, and outside of the major cities it’s common practice to leave keys in the ignition. I hate to lower someone’s high opinion of human nature, but it was that or risk a bus or train, so I wandered through Portsmouth until I found a Morris 1000 with the key in it and no one watching it.
This was less than a miracle. The remarkable thing was that the car had over half a tank of gas, more than enough to get me to Cornwall. After the extravagance of movies and drinks, I had only eight or nine shillings left. My money belt still held a thousand dollars, but the idea of attempting to change an American fifty-dollar bill at a petrol station left me colder than the rain, which was still falling and which the windshield wipers of the Morris were having a tough time with.
Minor problem, that. I kept my hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas, and the Morris, while not a good car, was a good enough car, and on we went. Cosham, Southampton, Dorchester, Honiton, Exeter, Okehampton, Launceston, Bodmin, Fraddon, and Truro. And just past Truro, at the end of a lonely ill-paved road, the thatched cottage where lived Arthur Poldexter, corresponding secretary of the Cornish chapter of the Celtic-Speaking Union.
I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Celtic-Speaking Union. Not many people have. The organization came into being just a few years ago, spurred largely by the parliamentary success of Welsh and Scottish Nationalists and the concommitant interest in linguistic nationalism. The CSU is a five-branched nationalist movement aimed at joining in a loose political federation those geographical areas where Celtic languages prevailed longest. The five areas are Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the French province of Brittany.
It would probably be infinitely easier to repeal the Law of Gravity than to transform the Celtic-Speaking Union into a political reality. This is nowhere more demonstrably the case than in Cornwall, where the old Celtic language of Cornish ceased to exist well over a century ago. As far as I was concerned, this only made the efforts of Arthur Poldexter and his fellows all the more admirable. Two of them, Ardel Tresillian and George Pollifax, had worked up a painstaking reconstruction of the Cornish language; I own a mimeographed copy of their manual and will study it as soon as I find the time.
I parked the Morris at the end of the lane and walked along a winding flagstone path, wishing as I walked that I had taken the time to learn Cornish properly. I knew just two words, and when the door opened to my knock I used them. “Free Cornwall!” I said.
Arthur Poldexter’s black eyes flashed in his ruddy face. He had no idea who I might be or what I might want, but I was a Cornish speaker and that was all that mattered. He gripped my shoulders, pulled me inside, and launched a flood of words at me.
I didn’t understand any of them.
“You must go to France, Evan. To Brittany – that would be best. The French police cooperate with the British, but there are comrades of ours among the Breton peasantry. I know several, and Pendennis and Trelease know others, and for sure you’ve friends there yourself. We should hide you here as long as you wish, but this evil land’s no sanctuary for you. What we know as an act of political assassination those in power call a murder. It must be Brittany for you, Evan.”
We had switched to English. Poldexter spoke a strongly accented English, but he was an educated man and was thus easier to follow than many of the locals might have been. He had not seen the newspapers yet. I gave him a version of the circumstances that was closer to the official story than the truth, figuring that the Jacobite League would get more of a response from him than some nonsense about white slavery in Afghanistan. He was instantly sympathetic and anxious to provide shelter. He went out to park the car where it would not be seen, and his little birdlike wife dished out a bowl of lamb stew and poured a huge mug of good brown ale for me.
“I’ll be making inquiries,” he assured me. “It’s a smuggler’s coast, this one. We’re few of us in the movement, but every man has friends, and friends in this part of the world know when to ask questions and when to be still. There’s some I know that make night time voyages to the French coast, and what they take across is not what they bring back. Round Dover, now, is where the crossing’s easiest and the smuggling thickest. There ’tis twenty mile across, and here nearer a hundred mile, but then at Dover the officials keep a keener watch. We’ll lay a bed for you now and you’ll sleep the night, and in the morning we will see what’s to be done for you.”