‘Oh, well; let’s have it,’ he said grudgingly.
And in I went with my Numnumo. He opened the door, and seemed all alone in the house. A decent meal, or even the hope of one, probably meant a lot to a man like that.
He brought me into a small room, off the hall, and switched on the light and sat down. ‘Let’s have a look at it,’ he said.
He was a nasty-looking fellow, sitting there. Not a man to play tricks with. I don’t say he could read your thoughts; but he had a quick look in his eyes, as though if you tried to think of anything clever, he’d get there before you. He had an orange-coloured moustache, chopped short; and he sat there looking at me. Ulton and Linley felt a long way away. I didn’t mind playing the Numnumo trick on him, or on any man; because that was second nature to me, and hardly felt like a trick. But I didn’t like playing the trick I was going to play.
‘This is your bottle,’ I said, pulling the Numnumo out of my pocket. And I managed to pull out three of the gas-bombs, too. ‘Samples,’ I said, as they came out.
But he wasn’t looking at what I had in my hands; he was staring at my glasses with the rubber fittings round them. I saw that, and explained in a hurry.
‘The fumes from Numnumo,’ I said, ‘don’t only make your mouth water; they make your eyes water too.’
Not much chance of selling it after that, of course; people don’t want to be weeping into their plates; but selling Num-numo wasn’t what I was after on that day.
He wouldn’t take his eyes off me. And then he put down a hand and slowly covered me with a revolver.
‘Oh! Don’t do that,’ I said.
And I dropped the three bombs full of tear-gas, and the bottle of relish on top. I apologized and stooped down to tidy up all the mess, and then the fumes reached him. So he got up and came groping towards me, meaning to shoot. But it was too late then; he couldn’t see. And I began dodging him quietly. He stopped to listen, following with his revolver any sounds that he heard or thought he heard; till all of a sudden he seemed to change his mind, and shot himself through the head.
IT’S some time now since I wrote about Mr Linley, and I don’t suppose anyone remembers the name of Smethers. That’s my name. But the whole world knows Numnumo, the relish for meats and savouries; and I push it. That is to say I travel and I take orders for it, or I used to, before this war upset everything. And some may remember the tale I wrote about that, about Numnumo I mean, because Mr Linley came into it, and he’s a man you don’t forget so easily; and, if you do, perhaps you don’t forget Steeger and what happened at Unge. Horrid it was. I told about that in my story: The Two Bottles of Relish I called it. And then Steeger turned up again; that was when he shot Constable Slugger, and they couldn’t catch him for either case. Funny, too; because the police knew perfectly well that he had done both murders, and Linley came along and told them how. Still, they couldn’t catch him. Well, they could catch him whenever they wanted to, but what I mean is there’d have been a verdict of Not Guilty, and the police were more afraid of that than a criminal is afraid of the other verdict. So Steeger was still at large. And then there came a case of a man that did three murders, and Linley helped the police over that. They got that man. And then the war came, and murder looked a very small thing, and no more had been heard of Steeger for a long time. Mr Linley got a commission, and, when they found out about his brains, he went to the War Office, to what they call M.I., and I went to be, what I never thought I’d be, a private soldier, and Numnumo was heard of no more, except for a few little wails from the advertisers, saying what a good thing it used to be. Yes, I got called up in the summer of 1940, and was put in barracks near London. I used often to lay awake at night under my brown blankets, thinking of the battles the British army had been in, things I’d heard of at school, and more that the sergeants taught us about, and trying to picture what they were like and what they sounded like; and all the while a battle raging over the barracks. I got the idea that some of those old battles might have been fairly quiet compared to those nights. But I don’t know.
Well, that battle was over in a year. We won it; I mean our airmen did. But we hadn’t much to spare. It was a nasty time. I don’t think the Germans would behave quite like that now. They’ve spoken very nicely of late about not destroying culture and civilization; but they didn’t quite understand in those days, and used to talk about rubbing our cities out; and they very nearly did. But I’m not going to write about the war; perhaps somebody will do that in a hundred years, beginning at 1914 and forgetting about the years from 1919 to 1939, and going on till it stops, and a very interesting tale he should make of it. I’m going to write about Mr Linley again. That brings me to the year 1943. I had a day’s leave, and got a lift on a lorry, and slipped up to London, and the first thing I did was to go round to Lancaster Street to have a look at the old flats. I wanted to have a look at them just to prove to myself that it was true that I hadn’t always lived in a barrack-room. Well, they’d gone, those flats had. There was a square of grass and weeds and flowers; and there was a lot of groundsel. And in a way I liked the look of it, though it wasn’t what I had come to see. They were rather dingy and dark, those flats as I remember them, and they called them Clarence Gardens. Now they really were gardens; or at any rate there was sunlight there, and some sort of flowers. I suppose there’s no one that doesn’t sigh for the country a bit some time or another in London, and here a bit of the country was, wild as any bit of the country you could see, even wilder than some of it. And for a moment I was glad to see this bit of sunlight and grass among all those miles of pavement, till I thought of all the slaughter that had gone to growing that groundsel. I looked up into the air then to see if I could locate just where our flat had been, because it seemed odd to think that I should have once been walking about, or sitting and listening to Mr Linley somewhere up towards the blue sky. And as I turned my eyes up from the groundsel I saw an officer standing near me and looking at me. I came to attention and saluted, and the officer said, ‘Why, it’s Smethers.’
And I said, ‘It’s not Mr Linley!’ For he looked so different in uniform.
And he said: ‘Yes, it is.’ And he shook hands.
And in a moment we were talking about the old flat.
Then he surprised me very much by saying: ‘You are just the man we want.’
Well, I’d had all sorts of jobs to do since they made me a soldier, all sorts of jobs, but nobody had ever said that to me. And here was Mr Linley saying it, just as if it was true.
‘Whatever for?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘That man Steeger is getting to work again.’
‘Steeger!’ I said. ‘The man that bought the two bottles of Numnumo.’
‘That’s the man,’ said Linley.
‘And shot Constable Slugger,’ I said. ‘What’s he up to now? His old tricks?’
‘Worse,’ said Linley.
‘Worse!’ I said. ‘Why, the man’s a murderer.’
‘He only murdered a couple of people, so far as we know,’ said Linley. ‘He was only a retail murderer. But he’s a spy now.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘He’s got into the wholesale business.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and we want you to help watch him.’
‘I’d be glad to help,’ I said, ‘in any way I could. Where is he?’
‘Oh, he’s here all right,’ said Linley. ‘He’s in London.’
‘Why don’t you arrest him?’ I asked.