The White Lie

CHAPTER I.

IS MAINLY MYSTERIOUS

“A woman – perhaps?”

“Who knows! Poor Dick Harborne was certainly a man of secrets, and of many adventures.”

“Well, it certainly is a most mysterious affair. You, my dear Barclay, appear to be the last person to have spoken to him.”

“Apparently I was,” replied Lieutenant Noel Barclay, of the Naval Flying Corps, a tall, slim, good-looking, clean-shaven man in aviator’s garb, and wearing a thick woollen muffler and a brown leather cap with rolls at the ears, as he walked one August afternoon up the village street of Mundesley-on-Sea, in Norfolk, a quaint, old-world street swept by the fresh breeze of the North Sea. “Yesterday I flew over here from Yarmouth to see the cable-laying, and met Dick in the post-office. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. We were shipmates in the Antrim before he retired from the service and went abroad.”

“Came into money, I suppose?” remarked his companion, Francis Goring, a long-legged, middle-aged man, who, in a suit of well-worn tweeds, presented the ideal type of the English landowner, as indeed he was – owner of Keswick Hall, a fine place a few miles distant, and a Justice of the Peace for the county of Norfolk.

“No,” replied the aviator, unwinding his woollen scarf. “That’s just it. I don’t think he came into money. He simply retired, and next we heard was that he was living a wandering, adventurous life on the Continent. I ran up against him in town once or twice, and he always seemed amazingly prosperous. Yet there was some sort of a mystery about him – of that I have always felt certain.”

“That’s interesting,” declared the man at his side. “Anything suspicious – eh?”

“Well, I hardly know. Only, one night as I was walking from the Empire along to the Rag, I passed a man very seedy and down-at-heel. He recognised me in an instant, and hurried on towards Piccadilly Circus. It was Dick – of that I’m absolutely convinced. I had a cocktail with him in the club next day, but he never referred to the incident.”

“If he had retired from the Navy, then what was his business, do you suppose?”

“Haven’t the slightest idea,” Barclay replied. “I met him here with a motor-bike late yesterday afternoon. We had a drink together across at the Grand, against the sea, and I left him just after five o’clock. I had the hydroplane out and went up from opposite the coastguard station,” he said, pointing to the small, well-kept grass plot on the left, where stood the flagstaff and the white cottages of the coastguard. “He watched me get up, and then, I suppose, he started off on his bike for Norwich. What happened afterwards is entirely shrouded in mystery. He was seen to pass through the market-place of North Walsham, five miles away, and an hour and a quarter later he was found, only three miles farther on, at a lonely spot near the junction of the Norwich road and that leading up to Worstead Station, between Westwick and Fairstead. A carter found him lying in a ditch at the roadside, stabbed in the throat, while his motor-cycle was missing!”

“From the papers this morning it appears that your friend has been about this neighbourhood a good deal of late. For what reason nobody knows. He’s been living sometimes at the Royal at Norwich and the King’s Head at Beccles for the past month or so, they say.”

“He told me so himself. He promised to come over to me at the air-station at Yarmouth to-morrow and lunch with me, poor fellow.”

“I wonder what really happened?”

“Ah, I wonder!” remarked the slim, well-set-up, flying officer. “A mere tramp doesn’t kill a fellow of Dick Harborne’s hard stamp in order to rob him of his cycle.”

“No. There’s something much more behind the tragedy, without a doubt,” declared the local Justice of the Peace. “Let’s hope something will come out at the inquest. Personally, I’m inclined to think that it’s an act of revenge. Most probably a woman is at the bottom of it.”

Barclay shook his head. He did not incline to that opinion.

“I wonder with what motive he cycled so constantly over to this neighbourhood from Norwich or Beccles?” exclaimed Goring. “What could have been the attraction? There must have been one, for this is an out-of-the-world place.”

“Your theory is a woman. Mine isn’t,” declared the lieutenant, bluntly, offering his friend a cigarette and lighting one himself. “No, depend upon it, poor old Dick was a man of mystery. Many strange rumours were afloat concerning him. Yet, after all, he was a real fine fellow, and as smart an officer as ever trod a quarter-deck. He was a splendid linguist, and had fine prospects, for he has an uncle an admiral on the National Defence Committee. Yet he chucked it all and became a cosmopolitan wanderer, and – if there be any truth in the gossip I’ve heard – an adventurer.”

“An outsider – eh?”

“Well – no, not exactly. Dick Harborne was a gentleman, therefore he could never have been an outsider,” replied the naval officer quickly. “By adventurer I mean that he led a strange, unconventional life. He was met by men who knew him in all sorts of out-of-the-world corners of Europe, where he spent the greater part of his time idling at cafés and in a section of society which was not altogether reputable.”

“And you say he was not an adventurer?” remarked the staid British landowner – one of a class perhaps the most conservative and narrow-minded in all the world.

“My dear fellow, travel broadens a man’s mind,” exclaimed the naval officer. “A man may be a cosmopolitan without being an adventurer. Dick Harborne, though there were so many sinister whispers concerning him, was a gentleman – a shrewd, deep-thinking, patriotic Englishman. And his death is a mystery – one which I intend to solve. I’ve come over here again to-day to find out what I can.”

“Well,” exclaimed Goring, “I for one am hardly satisfied with his recent career. While he was in the Navy and afloat – gunnery-lieutenant of one of His Majesty’s first-class cruisers – there appears to have been nothing against his personal character. Only after his retirement these curious rumours arose.”

“True, and nobody has fathomed the mystery of his late life,” admitted Barclay, drawing hard at his cigarette and examining the lighted end. “I’ve heard of him being seen in Cairo, Assouan, Monte Carlo, Aix, Berlin, Rome – all over the Continent, and in Egypt he seems to have travelled, and with much more means at his disposal than ever he had in the ward-room.”

“There are strange mysteries in some men’s lives, my dear Barclay. Harborne was a man of secrets without a doubt. Some of those secrets may come out at the inquest.”

“I doubt it. Poor Dick!” he sighed. “He’s dead – killed by an unknown hand, and his secret, whatever it was, has, I believe, gone to the grave with him. Perhaps, after all, it is best.”

“The police are very busy, I understand.”

“Oh, of course! The Norfolk Constabulary will be very active over it all, but I somehow have an intuition that the crime was one of no ordinary character. Dick must have dismounted to speak to his assailant. If he had been overthrown his machine would most probably have been damaged. The assassin wanted the motor-cycle intact to get away upon. Besides,” he added, “the victim took over an hour to cover the three miles between North Walsham and the spot where he was found. Something unusual must have occurred in that time.”

“Well, it can only be left to the police to investigate,” replied the tall, country squire, thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets.

“They won’t discover much – depend upon it,” remarked the naval officer, who, as he strolled at his friend’s side, presented the ideal type of the keen, British naval officer. “Dick has been the victim of a very carefully-prepared plot. That is my firm belief. I’ve been making some inquiries at the Grand Hotel, and learn that Dick came over from Norwich on his motor-cycle at nine o’clock yesterday morning for some purpose, and idled about Mundesley and the neighbourhood all the day. The head-waiter at the hotel knew him, for he had often lunched there. But yesterday he evidently came here with some fixed purpose, for he seemed to be eagerly expecting somebody, and at last, a little before two o’clock, a young lady arrived by the motor-bus from Cromer. They describe her as a neat, dark-haired, good-looking young person, rather well-dressed – and evidently a summer visitor. The pair walked about the village, and then went down to the beach and sat upon deck-chairs to chat. They returned to the hotel at half-past three and had tea together, tête-à-tête, in a small sitting-room. The waiter tells me that once, when he went in, suddenly, she was standing up, apparently urging him to act in opposition to his own inclinations. Her attitude, he says, was one of unusual force, it being evident that Dick was very reluctant to give some promise she was endeavouring to extract from him. She left again by the motor-bus for Cromer just after four.”

“Ah! There you are! The woman!” exclaimed the owner of Keswick Hall, with a smile. “I thought as much.”

“I don’t think she had anything to do with the affair,” said Barclay. “The police this morning obtained a detailed description of her – just as I have done – and they are now searching for her in Cromer, Runton, and Sheringham, believing her to be staying somewhere along this coast. She was dressed in a pale blue kit of a distinctly seaside cut, so the police are hoping to find her. Perhaps she doesn’t yet know of the tragic fate that has befallen poor Dick.”

“I wonder who the girl can be? No doubt she’d be able to make a very interesting statement – if they could only discover her.”

“I think she left Cromer last night,” Noel Barclay suggested to his companion.

“She would, if she were in any way implicated. Perhaps she has already gone!”

“No, I don’t agree. I believe she is still in ignorance.”

“What, I wonder, was the motive for their meeting here – in this quiet, out-of-the-world little place?” asked Goring. “If he wanted to see her, he might have motored to wherever she was staying, and not have brought her over here in a motor-bus. No, it was a secret meeting – that’s my opinion – and, as it was secret, it probably had some connection with the tragedy which afterwards occurred.”

The two men were now close to the “Gap,” or steep, inclined cart-road which ran down to the sands. On their right, a little way from the road, stood a small, shed-like building where the rocket life-saving apparatus of the Board of Trade was housed. In front, the roadway, and indeed all down the “Gap” and across the sands to where the waves lapped the shore, had been recently opened, for upon the previous day the shore end of the new German telegraph-cable connecting England with Nordeney had been laid. At that moment, while the cable-ship, on its return across the North Sea, was hourly paying out the cable, a German telegraph engineer was seated within the rocket-station, constantly making tests upon the submerged line between the shore and the ship.

Up from the trench beside the rocket-house came the cable – black, coiled, and snake-like, about three inches in thickness – its end disappearing within the small building.

“Been inside to-day?” asked Goring, just as they were passing.

“No. Let’s see how they are progressing,” the other said; and both turned into the little gate and asked permission to enter where the tests were being made.

Herr Strantz, the German engineer, a dark-haired, round-faced, middle-aged man, came forward, and, recognising the pair as visitors of the previous day, greeted them warmly in rather imperfect English, and bowed them into where, ranged on a long table, the whole length of the left-hand wall, stood a great quantity of mysterious-looking electrical appliances with a tangle of connecting wires, while below the tables stood a row of fully fifty large batteries, such as are used in telegraph work.

On the table, amid that bewildering assortment of queer-looking instruments, all scrupulously clean and highly polished, were two small brass lamps burning behind a long, narrow strip of transparent celluloid whereon was marked a minute gauge. On the edge of the table, before these lamps, was a switch, with black ebonite handle.

As the two Englishmen entered, the German’s eyes caught the small, round brass clock and noted that it was time to make the test – every five minutes, night and day, while the cable was in process of completion.

Therefore, without further word to his visitors, he carefully pulled over the long ebonite handle of the switch, and, at the same instant, a tiny spot of bright light showed upon the transparent gauge.

This the engineer examined to see its exact place upon the clearly-defined line, afterwards noting it in his book in cryptic figures, and then carefully switching off again, when the tell-tale light disappeared.

“Well?” asked Barclay. “How are you getting along? Not quite so much excitement in this place as yesterday – eh?”

“No,” laughed the engineer. “Der people here never see a shore-end floated to land wiz bojes (buoys) before. Dey have already buried der line in der trench, as you see. Ach! Your English workmen are far smarter than ours, I confess,” he added, with a pleasant accent.

“Is it being laid all right?” the airman asked.

“Ja, ja. Very good work. Der weather, he could not be better. We have laid just over one hundert mile in twenty-four hours. Gut – eh?”

As he spoke the Morse-sounder at the end of the green baize-covered table started clicking calling him.

In a moment his expert hand was upon the key, tapping a response.

The ship tapped rapidly, and then the engineer made an enquiry, and received a prompt reply.

Then tapped out the short-long-short-long and short, which meant “finish,” when, turning to the pair, he said:

“Dey hope to get it am Ufer (ashore) at daybreak to-morrow. By noon there will be another through line between Berlin and London.”

Lieutenant Barclay was silent. A sudden thought crossed his mind. At Bacton, a couple of miles farther down the coast, the two existing cables went out to the German shore. But this additional line would prove of immense value if ever the army of the great War Lord attempted an invasion of our island.

As a well-known naval aviator, and as chief of the whole chain of air-stations along the East Coast, the lieutenant’s mind was naturally ever set upon the possibility of projected invasion, and of an adequate defence. That a danger really existed had at last been tardily admitted by the Government, and now with our Navy redistributed and centred in the North Sea, our destroyer-flotillas exercising nightly, and the establishment of the wireless at Felixstowe, Caister, Cleethorpes, Scarborough, and Hunstanton, as well as the construction of naval air-stations, with their aeroplanes and hydroplanes from the Nore up to Cromarty we were at last on the alert for any emergency.

When would “Der Tag” (“The Day”) – as it was toasted every evening in the military messes of the German Empire – dawn? Aye, when? Who could say?

CHAPTER II.

CONCERNS A PRETTY STRANGER

A short, puffy, red-faced man in grey flannels went past.

It was Sir Hubert Atherton, of Overstrand – that little place declared to be the richest village in all England – and Francis Goring, recognising him, bade a hurried farewell to his naval friend, and with a hasty word of thanks to the German, went out.

The naval airman and the German were left alone.

Again the round-faced cable engineer pulled over the double-throw switch, examined the tiny point of light upon the gauge, and registered its exact position.

“You remember, Herr Strantz, the gentleman who accompanied me here yesterday,” exclaimed Barclay, when the engineer had finished writing up his technical log.

“Certainly. Der gentleman who was a motor-cyclist?”

“Yes. He was found on the road last evening, murdered.”

“Zo!” gasped the German, staring at his visitor. “Killed!”

“Yes; stabbed to death fifteen miles from here, and his motor-cycle was missing. It is a mystery.”

“Astounding!” exclaimed Herr Strantz. “He took tea mit a lady over at the hotel. I saw them there when I went off duty at half-past three o’clock.”

“I know. The police are now searching for that lady.”

“Dey will not have much difficulty in finding her, I suppose – hein?” the engineer replied. “I myself know her by sight.”

“You know her!” cried the Englishman. “Why, I thought you only arrived here from Germany two days ago. Where have you met her?”

“In Bremen, at the Krone Hotel, about three months ago. She call herself Fräulein Montague, and vos awaiting her mother who vos on her way from New York.”

“Did she recognise you?”

“I think not. I never spoke to her in the hotel. She was always a very reserved but very shrewd young lady,” replied Herr Otto Strantz, slowly but grammatically. “I was surprised to meet her again.”

“Montague!” the airman repeated. “Do you know her Christian name?”

“Jean Montague,” was the German’s response as he busied himself carefully screwing down one of the terminals of an instrument.

Noel Barclay made a quick note of the name in a tiny memorandum-book which he always carried in his flying-jacket.

He offered the German one of his cigarettes – an excellent brand smoked in most of the ward-rooms of His Majesty’s Navy – and then endeavoured to obtain some further information concerning his dead shipmate’s visitor.

But Herr Strantz, whose sole attention seemed centred upon the shore-end of the new cable which was so soon to form yet another direct link between Berlin and London, was in ignorance of anything connected with the mysterious young person.

The statement that Harborne – the motor-cyclist who had spoken the German language so well when he had accompanied the pretty young girl the day before to watch the testing – was dead, seemed to cause the cable-engineer considerable reflection. He said nothing, but a close observer would have noticed that the report of the murder had had a distinct effect upon him. He was in possession of some fact, and this, as a stranger on that coast, and a foreigner to boot, it was not, after all, very difficult to hide.

Noel, however, did not notice it. His mind was chiefly occupied in considering the best and most diplomatic means by which the missing lady, who lived in Bremen as Miss Montague, could be traced.

The two men smoked their cigarettes; Strantz pulling over the switch every five minutes – always to the very tick of the round brass clock – examining the tiny point of light which resulted, and carefully registering the exact amount of current and the position of the ship engaged in paying out the black, insulated line into the bed of the German Ocean.

While Noel watched he also wondered whether, in the near future, that very cable across the sea would be used by England’s enemy for the purposes of her destruction. True, we had our new wireless stations all along the coast, and at other places inland at Ipswich, Chelmsford, and elsewhere, yet if what was feared really came to pass, all those, together with the shore-ends of the cables, would be seized by advance parties of Germans already upon British soil – picked men, soldiers all, who were already living to-day in readiness upon the East Coast of England as hotel-servants, clerks or workers in other trades. Our shrewd, business-like friends across the grey, misty sea would take care to strike a blow on our shores by the wrecking of bridges, the disabling of railways, the destruction of telegraphs, and the like, simultaneous with their frantic dash upon our shore. Germany never does anything by halves, nor does she leave anything to chance.

Herr Strantz, having finished some calculations, and having tapped out a message to the ship, raised his head, and with a smile upon his broad, clean-shaven face, said, with his broad German accent:

“Ech! You are an officer. I suppose that, if the truth were told, England hardly welcomes another cable laid by Germany – hein?”

“Well,” laughed the airman, pushing his big, round goggles higher upon his brow, “we sometimes wonder when your people are really coming.”

“Who knows?” asked the other, smiling and elevating his shoulders. “Never – perhaps.”

“Ah! Many there are in England who still regard invasion by the Kaiser’s army as a bogey,” Noel Barclay remarked. “But surely it is not impossible, or why should the British authorities suddenly awaken to the peril of the air?”

“All is possible to Germany – when the time is ripe. That is my private opinion as a Deutscher, and as one who has an opportunity of observing,” the other frankly responded.

“I quite agree,” was Noel’s reply. “Dreams of ten years ago are to-day accomplished facts. Aeroplanes cross the Channel and the Alps, and fly from country to country in disregard of diplomatic frontiers, while your German airships – unfortunate as they may be – have actually crossed to us here, and returned without us being any the wiser. Had they been hostile they could have destroyed whole cities in a single night!”

“And your ever-watchful coastguards who actually saw them were disbelieved,” the German laughed.

“Yes. I admit the air is conquered by your people – and Great Britain is now no longer an island. Wireless messages can be transmitted five thousand miles to-day, and who knows that it may not be possible to-morrow, by directing similar electric rays, to blow up explosives wherever they may be concealed – in the magazines of battleships or in land forts?”

“Ach, yes!” agreed the engineer. “Ten years ago war between England and Germany was more improbable than it is to-day, for each day, I fear, brings us nearer to hostilities – which we, in Germany, know to be inevitable.”

“And when that day dawns we shall have to exert every force, every nerve, every muscle, if we are to repel you,” remarked Noel, his clear-cut face unusually dark and serious.

“I fear that you will, sir,” was the other’s quiet response. “Individually we want to be friends mit England, but you, as a British officer, know quite well that one day the powder magazine will explode and there must be der war. It will be forced suddenly and swiftly upon the Kaiser and upon the people.”

“Yes,” sighed the naval airman. “So all we can now do is to remain good friends as long as ever we can – eh? Forewarned is forearmed.”

“Exactly; but,” added the German, “I trust the openness of my remarks has given you no offence, sir. If it has, then I beg you to accept my most sincere apologies. You are an officer and serve your country. I, too, am an officer of reserve and serve mine.”

“Surely no apologies are needed, my dear Herr Strantz,” laughed the lieutenant, extending his hand frankly. “We have both exchanged our opinions. In most I agree with you, although, of course, I naturally believe in England’s invincible power on the sea.”

“That is but natural, my dear lieutenant. You are English,” was the engineer’s response, and while he turned again to pull over the testing-switch and bent to examine the point of light, Noel was puzzled as to his exact meaning.

Presently Noel Barclay, shaking Herr Strantz’s hand, humorously expressed a hope that they might never find themselves enemies, and that the cable might be successfully completed and inaugurated on the morrow; strode out into the village street, and down the “Gap” to that wide expanse of golden sands where a big Post Office gang were busily at work covering up the long black cable lying in its trench.

The engineer of the General Post Office who was in charge, recognising the airman, wished him good afternoon; but his thoughts were centred upon the mysterious death of the man about whom so many queer rumours had been afloat.

Rumours! Ah, how well he recollected one of them – a rumour that had gone around the Service – namely that he had retired with the money earned by selling to a foreign power a certain secret concerning “plotting.” For that reason, it was said, he had lived so constantly abroad. Though the offence had never been brought home to him by the Admiralty, yet the rumour had never been contradicted. Mud thrown, alas! always sticks.