Bond was definite. ‘I just can’t see Strangways flying off the handle like that, sir. I daresay he was having an affair with the girl, though I wouldn’t have thought he was a man to mix business with pleasure. But the Service was his whole life. He’d never have let it down. I can see him handing in his papers, and the girl doing the same, and then going off with her after you’d sent out reliefs. But I don’t believe it was in him to leave us in the air like this. And from what you say of the girl, I’d say it would be much the same with her. Chief Officers W.R.N.S. don’t go out of their senses.’
‘Thank you, 007.’ M.’s voice was controlled. ‘These considerations had also crossed my mind. No one’s been jumping to conclusions without weighing all the possibilities. Perhaps you can suggest another solution.’
M. sat back and waited. He reached for his pipe and began filling it. The case bored him. He didn’t like personnel problems, least of all messy ones like this. There were plenty of other worries waiting to be coped with round the world. It was only to give Bond the pretence of a job, mixed with a good rest, that he had decided to send him out to Jamaica to close the case. He put the pipe in his mouth and reached for the matches. ‘Well?’
Bond wasn’t going to be put off his stride. He had liked Strangways and he was impressed by the points the Chief of Staff had made. He said: ‘Well, sir. For instance, what was the last case Strangways was working on? Had he reported anything, or was there anything Section III had asked him to look into. Anything at all in the last few months?’
‘Nothing whatsoever.’ M. was definite. He took the pipe out of his mouth and cocked it at the Chief of Staff. ‘Right?’
‘Right, sir,’ said the Chief of Staff. ‘Only that damned business about the birds.’
‘Oh that,’ said M. contemptuously. ‘Some rot from the Zoo or somebody. Got wished on us by the Colonial Office. About six weeks ago, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right, sir. But it wasn’t the Zoo. It was some people in America called the Audubon Society. They protect rare birds from extinction or something like that. Got on to our Ambassador in Washington, and the F.O. passed the buck to the Colonial Office. They shoved it on to us. Seems these bird people are pretty powerful in America. They even got an atom bombing range shifted on the West Coast because it interfered with some birds’ nests.’
M. snorted. ‘Damned thing called a Whooping Crane. Read about it in the papers.’
Bond persisted. ‘Could you tell me about it, sir? What did the Audubon people want us to do?’
M. waved his pipe impatiently. He picked up the Strangways file and tossed it down in front of the Chief of Staff. ‘You tell him, Chief of Staff,’ he said wearily. ‘It’s all in there.’
The Chief of Staff took the file and riffled through the pages towards the back. He found what he wanted and bent the file in half. There was silence in the room while he ran his eye over three pages of typescript which Bond could see were headed with the blue and white cipher of the Colonial Office. Bond sat quietly, trying not to feel M.’s coiled impatience radiating across the desk.
The Chief of Staff slapped the file shut. He said, ‘Well, this is the story as we passed it to Strangways on January 20th. He acknowledged receipt, but after that we heard nothing from him.’ The Chief of Staff sat back in his chair. He looked at Bond. ‘It seems there’s a bird called a Roseate Spoonbill. There’s a coloured photograph of it in here. Looks like a sort of pink stork with an ugly flat bill which it uses for digging for food in the mud. Not many years ago these birds were dying out. Just before the war there were only a few hundred left in the world, mostly in Florida and thereabouts. Then somebody reported a colony of them on an island called Crab Key between Jamaica and Cuba. It’s British territory – a dependency of Jamaica. Used to be a guano island, but the quality of the guano was too low for the cost of digging it. When the birds were found there, it had been uninhabited for about fifty years. The Audubon people went there and ended up by leasing a corner as a sanctuary for these spoonbills. Put two wardens in charge and persuaded the airlines to stop flying over the island and disturbing the birds. The birds flourished and at the last count there were about five thousand of them on the island. Then came the war. The price of guano went up and some bright chap had the idea of buying the island and starting to work it again. He negotiated with the Jamaican Government and bought the place for ten thousand pounds with the condition that he didn’t disturb the lease of the sanctuary. That was in 1943. Well, this man imported plenty of cheap labour and soon had the place working at a profit and it’s gone on making a profit until recently. Then the price of guano took a dip and it’s thought that he must be having a hard time making both ends meet.’
‘Who is this man?’
‘Chinaman, or rather half Chinese and half German. Got a daft name. Calls himself Doctor No – Doctor Julius No.’
‘No? Spelt like Yes?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Any facts about him?’
‘Nothing except that he keeps very much to himself. Hasn’t been seen since he made his deal with the Jamaican Government. And there’s no traffic with the island. It’s his and he keeps it private. Says he doesn’t want people disturbing the guanay birds who turn out his guano. Seems reasonable. Well, nothing happened until just before Christmas when one of the Audubon wardens, a Barbadian, good solid chap apparently, arrived on the north shore of Jamaica in a canoe. He was very sick. He was terribly burned – died in a few days. Before he died he told some crazy story about their camp having been attacked by a dragon with flames coming out of its mouth. This dragon had killed his pal and burned up the camp and gone roaring off into the bird sanctuary belching fire among the birds and scaring them off God knows where. He had been badly burned but he’d escaped to the coast and stolen a canoe and sailed all one night to Jamaica. Poor chap was obviously off his rocker. And that was that, except that a routine report had to be sent off to the Audubon Society. And they weren’t satisfied. Sent down two of their big brass in a Beechcraft from Miami to investigate. There’s an airstrip on the island. This Chinaman’s got a Grumman Amphibian for bringing in supplies …’
M. interjected sourly, ‘All these people seem to have a hell of a lot of money to throw about on their damned birds.’
Bond and the Chief of Staff exchanged smiles. M. had been trying for years to get the Treasury to give him an Auster for the Caribbean Station.
The Chief of Staff continued: ‘And the Beechcraft crashed on landing and killed the two Audubon men. Well, that aroused these bird people to a fury. They got a corvette from the U.S. Training Squadron in the Caribbean to make a call on Doctor No. That’s how powerful these people are. Seems they’ve got quite a lobby in Washington. The captain of the corvette reported that he was received very civilly by Doctor No but was kept well away from the guano workings. He was taken to the airstrip and examined the remains of the plane. Smashed to pieces, but nothing suspicious – came in to land too fast probably. The bodies of the two men and the pilot had been reverently embalmed and packed in handsome coffins which were handed over with quite a ceremony. The captain was very impressed by Doctor No’s courtesy. He asked to see the wardens’ camp and he was taken out there and shown the remains of it. Doctor No’s theory was that the two men had gone mad because of the heat and the loneliness, or at any rate that one of them had gone mad and burned down the camp with the other inside it. This seemed possible to the captain when he’d seen what a godforsaken bit of marsh the men had been living in for ten years or