The Fox Prowls

A WANDERER COMES HOME

A WANDERER COMES HOMEIt was only mid-October, but the first fog of the year had dropped down over London. The day had broken dim and windless and the risen sun showed itself to Londoners going to work as a pink disc glowing through an orange pall. By noon the lights were on and along Oxford Street and Regent Street the shop-fronts blazed. In Piccadilly the electric signs were flashing above the silvery furrows cut by the head-lamps of the slowly groping traffic.

With the falling of dusk the fog thickened. In London's vast acreage of suburbs, away from the glare of the shopping streets, it was night. As Boulton's taxi chugged into the quiet square, the trees stood like dim wraiths behind the battered railings of the central garden, and the street lamps, ringed with brown radiance, had the dull gleam of sequins sewn on the curtain of fog. The air was raw and smelt of soot; the young man shivered in his thick scarf and heavy Melton overcoat. "What a day to come home!" he murmured.

The taxi stopped at one of the tall houses in the square, a "gentleman's residence," mid-Victorian and smug, the sort of place where you would expect a judge or a prosperous chartered accountant to live. Boulton jumped out, thrust his hand in his pocket. "Hell!" he remarked to the dim figure on the box, "Egyptian money is no good to you, is it? Just a minute!"

All the lights were on in the hall when Petty Officer Potts, 180 pounds of solid muscle turning into fat, opened to his ring. "Potts, my old salt!" was the young man's greeting.

The door-man's forefinger jerked to his grizzled cow-lick. "Arternoon, Mr. Boulton, sir! We ain't seen you in a row o' Sundays! Blow me down, it must be all o' three months! My word, you 'ave bin out in the sun, 'aven't you? As nice a coat o' tan as ever I see!"

The young man shuddered. "Does the sun ever shine in this cursed town, I wonder?" he remarked feelingly. With a flick of the hand he sent his rather grubby felt flying in the direction of the hat-stand. It landed adroitly on one of the hooks. "Bulls-eye!" he murmured with gratification. The doorman helped him out of his overcoat. "Ouch! Mind my shoulder!" the visitor warned.

"Still 'ave trouble with it, do you, sir?" said the other, folding the garment and laying it on the chair.

Boulton nodded. "It's this cursed damp weather. Ah, my Potts, never sell your farm and go up in the air!"

The door-man grinned. "No fear, Mr. Boulton, sir! I copped mine at Jutland. I'm ashore for keeps!"

"A Jutland veteran, a hero full of honours, with a snug berth and a pension—you're on velvet, Potts. Look at me! A choked feed pipe crashes me and because it's in peace time and I'm not on duty, I'm just a blinking civilian with a busted shoulder and darn glad to have landed a job. The trouble is, Potts, my hearty, I was born too late!"

The door-man chuckled. "There was times in the war when some of us allowed as we was born too early!"

"And to think," the young man continued, unwinding his scarf, "that I might have flown one of these marvellous new 'buses they're dishing out to the troops at present instead of the sudden death contraptions which were all we had when I was in the Force. Oh, hell!" He dropped his scarf on top of his overcoat. "Don't shut that door for a moment: I have to pay off my cab. Hey, Hanky!"

A plain girl of indeterminate age, very neat as to dress and hair, was crossing the hall. At his hail she advanced composedly under the rays of the hall lamp peering through horn-rimmed glasses. "So you've arrived at last!" she observed without enthusiasm.

He struck an attitude and in a voice that shook the hall, chanted:

"At home at last, all danger past,

I hail my native vill—age!"

dwelling tenderly on the last note, which ran up an octave. He held out his hand. "Half a dollar for the taxi, please. I've no English money. Why on earth do you have to live in the suburbs?"

"Stop that noise at once! The Chief's in conference." She was hunting through her purse. "Mind you pay me back! No charging it against the petty cash. Your expense allowance ceases when you leave your post, you know."

"But not when my post leaves me. Thanks, loveliness!" He took the half-crown she gave him and handed it to the door-man. "Discharge the charioteer, my ancient sea-lion!"

The girl said severely: "The Chief expected you for lunch. Why are you so late?"

"The fog, angel, the fog. Ceiling zero and visibility even less. They put us down at Lympne." He had slipped his arm in hers. "Tell me, dear heart, are you still in love with me?"

Firmly she detached his arm. "Couldn't you have telephoned or something? The Chief has asked for you at least half a dozen times."

"And how is my aged employer?"

"Worried. The Foreign Office has been playing up again. Sir Herbert's with him now. You'd better wait in my room."

She led the way towards a door at the end of the hall. Boulton said, "How do I stand with him?"

"You'll find out fast enough!"

"He realises they were on to me, that I had to skip. I mean, when he recalled me like that..."

"You can't teach him anything about the service!"

She showed him into a plain office lined with white cupboards. There was a typewriter and a very neat desk on which stood a bunch of asters in a vase. She sat down at the typewriter and began to type. Boulton picked up a photograph from one of the desk trays. "Who's the pretty girl, Hanky?"

"It's Melissa Selmar, Stephen Selmar's daughter."

"The millionaire, the American motor-car fellow, do you mean?"

She nodded, typing on.

He pursed his lips appraisingly. "Rather fetching. What's her picture doing here?"

"It's the Chief's. And don't go poking about in my trays! I don't like it." She took the photograph away from him and thrust it in a drawer. Boulton's eyes followed the picture to its resting place. "Old man stepping out, is he?" he observed whimsically. "My, my, what a time you must have, Hanky dear! When you're not receiving lovely American heiresses for our beloved Chief, you're entertaining a never-ending succession of romantic and, if I may say so without vanity, unusually good-looking Intelligence officers."

The secretary turned up her line to rub out a word. "Those must be the ones I haven't met," she observed witheringly, plying her eraser.

Her companion placed his hand on her shoulder. "No, no, dear Hanky, you must not speak like that. Verily 'tis piteous when a refined young female allows the iron to enter her soul. Child, if you have not discerned the qualities of your fellow labourers in the vineyard, is it not because your glance has failed to penetrate through the dross to the—er, solid ore beneath? Beauty, dear maid, is but skin deep. What if the faithful Armitage is but five feet high with hair a peculiarly loathsome shade of red, if our brother Elkington has a wall eye and the somewhat dreary Dyson's teeth fit badly so that it is like a whistling solo when he talks—what are these trifling blemishes by comparison with the sterling merit that gleams like minted gold beneath the surface? And there are others, notably one, whom modesty forbids me to name, who combines the—ah, external husk of a Prince Charming with the soul of a Sir Galahad, oh, my Hanky."

She shook his hand off. "Stop pawing me about and let me get on with my work. These letters have to catch the continental mail."

He sighed. "When I joined the service three years ago, I followed the lure of romance. Did I find romance? Yes, I did not. I live the life of a travelling bagman and when I come home with my honours thick upon me, I have to trapse out to the darkest suburbs only to have the aged Potts blow his beery breath all over me and to be kept kicking my heels in the ante-chamber."

"You'll be kicking them in the hall if you don't stop talking," Miss Hancock promised grimly.

The Chief's room was spacious and lofty. The elaborately moulded ceiling, the crystal chandelier and the marble fireplace suggested that it had been the drawing-room formerly: a very large map of Europe almost filling one wall, a wireless set, a row of steel filing cabinets and a large safe built into the wall oddly contrasted with these embellishments.

High Foreign Office officials are not frequent visitors at Secret Service headquarters. But a quarter of a century before in the Great War Sir Herbert Ashcroft, then a Third Secretary in the Diplomatic Service, and the grizzled man who now sat opposite him across the desk had undergone sundry unrecorded but none the less exciting adventures together at various neutral centres, and the link endured. At that time Ashcroft had been a young man about town with a Guardsman's silhouette and a neat Guards moustache. He was still sleek and well-groomed and retained the moustache; but he was losing his hair and if his back was still straight his Guardsman's figure was nearer that of a Guards sergeant-major than a subaltern's.

With a plaintive air he was saying, "You know what he is, old boy. He wants Armitage. He was greatly impressed by that report of his from Beirut. Why can't he have Armitage if he wants him?"

"I've told you already, Bertie—Armitage isn't available."

"How do you mean 'not available'?"

"He's away on a job. In Rumania, to be precise."

"You can bring him home, can't you?"

"Not off this job, Bertie." He paused. "This is for you and nobody else, not even your old man. Armitage is keeping an eye on an old friend of ours."

"Not 'The Fox'?"

"'The Fox,' no less!"

CHAPTER V