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Authors: Margery Allingham

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‘Very impressive. He shoots the most magnificent line ever. I've heard him on the well pressed bootlace.
Was
he ever in Royal service?'

Mr Campion controlled his amusement. ‘He's looked after me for quite a few years as a sort of housekeeper,' he began cautiously.

‘I know, but he says this was when he was younger. He was telling one of the architects he did a spell for the Monarch before he lost his figure.'

The thin man relaxed. ‘That was only for six months,' he said. ‘It was the—er—Palace of Wormwood Scrubs, I believe. Which architects are these?'

‘The people who are gunning for the job of building his bungalow.' Morty spoke with authority. ‘He's retiring to Saltey to take up archaeology, or so he says. Didn't he tell you? He could choose a worse place.'

‘Oh, what is there?'

‘I'm not sure, yet.' The distinctive young face had become earnest. ‘As you know, the paper I'm doing is on London's approaches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and when you asked me to investigate that crazy damn story there, I was genuinely looking for something else.'

‘Saltey: gateway to the East End?'

‘You're not so far out, and it's my own beautiful discovery.' Morty's grin was joyful. ‘There's not a breath of it in any of the authorities but I think I've got proof that the little harbour
there, which is practically silted up now, is all that is left of the ancient bolt hole, old London's eastern emergency exit. As a matter of fact, Saltey is the other end of Mob's Hole. I'm sure of it now. The lower half of the village where the best pub stands is called Mob's Bowl today and that's hardly a distortion, is it? There it is, written on the survey maps and the signposts.' He paused in sudden doubt. ‘You have heard of Mob's Hole?'

‘Should I?'

‘Perhaps not. I'm quite besotted with my subject. Anyway, you can take it from me that it existed in Wanstead about seventeen ten or so. It was a rakehelly dive, a kind of roadhouse where the “mobility”—that's the joke name of the period for the tarts and townees who had transport—used to ride out of the city for a feed, what we'd call a barbecue, and a punch-up. There is a fine fruity account of it in
The London Spy
.'

‘Do the present day people of Saltey subscribe to this?'

‘Gosh, no. They've never heard of it. They think, if they think at all, that the Bowl is derived from the silted up tidal basin by the quay and that it could be a relic of a prehistoric salt panning industry. One old biddy told me it was “Mab” and not “Mob” and was a direct reference to the Fairy Queen.'

‘How old is Saltey?'

‘Oh, dateless. In prehistoric times it was at the edge of the single great river mouth. Then it became a delta as the mud banks shifted and finally it grew into the marsh and plough we know. Since its heyday, which was probably pre-Saxon, it must have grown more and more inefficient as the clay took over. I'm certain there's an early fortress by the highest part of the sea wall just waiting to be uncovered.' He sighed and laughed at himself for it. ‘That's not my period and so is not my province, which is the infuriating thing about history. It does keep repeating itself but only in its untidy way. New names get attached to old happenings and vice versa. If I don't stick
to my own period I'll be lost in a morass of extra information. But it's a honey of a find. Do you know what the upper or respectable end of the place is called?
Forty
Angels.'

‘Really?' Mr Campion so far forgot himself as to take his eyes off the garden he had been watching so steadfastly. ‘Come to think of it, I did know that one. It's later than the other end and the name was given it as a safeguard against slander. Call a gathering The Forty Thieves and it could mean trouble, but say Forty Angels and no one wants to black your eye. Yes, your meaning is clear. Isn't that right?'

Morty wagged his head.

‘It looks pretty damned odd on the Ordnance Survey,' he said. ‘It's a crazy name for a village district, even in England. Saltey was on the end of an escape route. It was the funnel through which secret goods or people were smuggled in or out of East London. It's remote even now. Not in miles of course—it's just cut off. The approach is terrible.'

‘Through that maze of lanes lying beyond the Southend road, I suppose?'

‘Oh yes, it's still a Cinderella. Today there's a bungalow dormitory two miles wide but before that one has to pass a waste of worked out clay pits which have been turned into a wilderness by various army training courses and old defence works. Long before they were as much as thought of, that was where the Great Dump was.'

In the back of Mr Campion's mind a faint bell rang. ‘Was that “The Trough”?'

‘That's right!' Morty was delighted. ‘It was a swamp really. The little Rattey River rose in it and drained out to reach the sea at Saltey. It first appears as a place of ill omen in the Middle Ages, when for a time it was thought to be the source of the Plague. For generations it was a no-man's land, an Alsatia worse than any shanty town. Bands of diseased beggars wandered around. Indestructible rubbish was shot there. Rats and wild dogs bred there and I believe there were ferocious wild
pig as late as eighteen hundred. No one in his senses took a path through the place and there are some hair-raising tales of kidnappings, murdered coachmen, wandering lunatics and even cannibalism. On the far side of it, nearer the coast, there was woodland, an arm of the old forest which covered the whole country at one time. Then there is a strip of twitchy heath, some of which isn't enclosed even now, and after that the mouth of the tiny Rattey River estuary and Saltey. You can drive through it all now, but it's still not easy to find. No industry you see. Not suitable land for development. Just the saltings and Saltey. When you do reach it, there it sits, smug and deserted and not very pleased to see you.'

‘You say there are no new residents?'

‘None that I've heard of.' He turned and glanced across the garden. ‘Its only claim to fame is that a peculiarly revolting mother-figure was found in a field at Firestone, four miles away, in nineteen hundred. That's in the British Museum now—in the horror comic room. Hey!'

He leaned forward. A solitary figure had appeared on the path approaching the bandstand. He was some distance away and was making for the distant gate in front of the skyscraper and the baroque hotel.

‘See who that is?' he demanded in some excitement as he took a small gunmetal cylinder from the open map compartment in front of him. ‘I think I'm right, though I've only seen him once before. He's almost commonplace close to, but utterly distinctive from a distance. It's the thing I particularly noticed about him. Hang on, I'll give you the bird-watching glass in a moment.' He put the little telescope to his eye and crowed.

‘I'm right! That's L. C. Corkran, head of Intelligence and Security or whatever you call it over here. My, my! He looks pretty sour, doesn't he?'

Mr Campion, who had stiffened involuntarily at the mention of the name, recovered himself and accepted the little instrument.

‘He's retiring, I believe,' said Morty, his ingenuousness unquestionable, ‘at the end of the year.'

His passenger grunted. ‘About time too, if he's as well known as that.'

‘Oh, it's not general knowledge. One of our attaches pointed him out to me at a Test Match when I first came over. I remembered him because I was told he was quite somebody years ago.' He spoke regretfully. ‘Burn-before-reading top secrets are dead ducks nowadays. It must be tough on these old boys to have their hush-hush departments degenerating into tatting houses all round them. They're all full of old ladies sticking little silver knives into each other's backs now. Or so they say.' He shook his head and changed the subject.' You know, I can easily imagine this town teeming with sedan chairs and stinking bullies in silk coats, but I'm darned if I can see it as the gaping ruin it must have been only twenty odd years ago. It doesn't seem possible. It's so elderly and permanent and—I won't say pompous—urbane, perhaps.'

Mr Campion let him chatter. Through the ‘escape and evasion' glass, an instrument with which he had once been uncomfortably familiar but had now become a mere ‘war surplus store', he was watching the grim features of one of his oldest and closest friends. He and L. C. Corkran, ‘Elsie' to his familiars, met seldom nowadays but there had been a time when each had been content to know that his life was in the other's hands. Morty was right. The old man looked bitter. Mr Campion knew that expression and he kept the glass on him as he came up with the bandstand. He shot a glance at it from force of habit, because of its memories and strode on, his heavy chin thrust out, his shoulders sagging and his eyes down. There was defeat written all over him. As he turned and his face was hidden, Mr Campion raised the glass to the new skyscraper beside the old hotel. Of the nest of windows on the ninth and tenth floors, two had curtains looped back by cautious hands. They dropped into place as the solitary figure advanced.

Old ladies with silver knives? More accurately dry grey serpents with shiny duct-fed teeth. The thin man shivered and returned the little telescope to its locker.

‘How soon can you get back to Saltey?' he enquired.

‘You've made up your mind already? Wonderful. I thought you'd have to have a conference or something. I can go down there today, as a matter of fact. Am I still to be investigating the great Saltey Demon? I'm afraid that's going to turn out to be a dead loss, by the way.'

‘I thought it might. What is it? A rustic joke?'

‘Sort of. The lady at the pub has been casting round for something to attract visitors ever since she took over the place. She had a yen for one of those God-awful wishing-wells you find all over the West Country. You know the sort of thing. Fling your dime into the water and the local pixies will reward you with a lucky pebble and a picture postcard of the waterfront. She kept worrying to know if Saltey had such a sprite and eventually someone—her husband perhaps, for he's a local—came forward with this unlikely devil. They tell the tale on Friday nights in walnut time when the moon is full. Or something like that.'

Mr Campion laughed.

‘She must have sold the idea to the local papers because the nationals picked it up a year or two back. I read it somewhere. A coloured Sunday, I think.'

‘You told me. Anyway, the legend provides me with a fairly reasonable excuse for hanging round. At the moment I'm the poor young Yankee professor, good for a free pint and folksy tale any day.'

‘And no one new has arrived in the village in the past year or so?'

‘Only the pub people, or rather the woman. A couple called Wishart. Her name is Dixie and she's not exactly an intellectual but she means well and she's a worker. Her husband is not. He's a man of culture in his odd way—quite a different background, anyhow, I'd say. I think he lived around those
parts as a boy. He writes poetry and gets it published or used to.'

‘Not H. O. Wishart?'

‘That's the man. He's about sixty-five now and not the best of value, but he's in the anthologies. She keeps a Georgian Poetry under the bar counter and trots it out on the least provocation.'

‘
Beware of me: I cast no shadow when I pass
,' quoted Mr Campion. ‘That's the chap, isn't it? A genuine minor poet and a white hope at one time. I didn't know he was at the inn. Did you say it was called “The Demon”?'

‘That's very recent. Dixie got the brewers to change it. Partly because the other pub is called The Angel, and partly on account of the old joke about the Demon. It used to be called “The Foliage”, which she was mistaken enough to think dull.'

Morty met the other man's raised eyebrows and laughed. ‘I know. It can only be a contraction of “The Foliate Man”, can't it? I tell you the place is full of good things. Add that to the Fertility Venus and one or two other items and the shenanigans the wilder teenage gangs get up to along the sea wall don't seem half as modern as they might.'

‘Tearaways? You get them down there?' The thin man looked interested but Morty shrugged.

‘They're everywhere. They don't stay. They just swoop down on motor bikes—ton-up types. They tear off their space-man rig-outs and jump in the sea. Then they eat the shop out of cake, drain the pub of shandy and mock champagne and rush off again. That and the occasional orgy.'

‘It sound promising.'

‘Not really, as it turned out.' He was a thought sulky as if something still rankled. ‘Little tramps,' he said suddenly. ‘I went round to the sea wall only a week ago to watch some saddleback gulls and I sat down out of the wind and went to sleep. It was quite early and pretty nippy weather. When I woke up there were some of these kids—they were sixteen or seventeen I suppose—screaming and dancing almost on top of
me, dressed in crash helmets and boots and damn all else as far as I could see. Not that I blame them for the boots, the saltings are infested with grass snakes they say, but the point is—they wanted to shock me.'

He paused. ‘Little tramp,' he repeated.

‘One in particular?'

‘As a matter of fact, yes. The ringleader, I think. She was skipping round me like Salome without much in the way of veils, just waiting for the laugh when I opened my eyes. It was all unnatural and wild because it was so early in the year for that sort of thing. I scuttled back to the village and in a minute or two they came roaring past and rode me into a dyke. Seven or eight of them, all scruffy ringlets and black leather, and as high as kites, I'd say. Full of pep pills or worse. Perhaps I'm growing old. Anyhow, they didn't stay and I haven't seen a sign of them since. I take it you're interested in something a little less fancy?'

BOOK: Cargo of Eagles
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