The Plague of Silence Read online

  Larry Hill, who had been at the back of the schoolroom where the inquest had been held, was among the first to leave. He looked ten years older than he had when Korven had visited him, and harassed and worried. At home, Jane was up and about, but still sick and unable to throw off the effects of the seizure. She had not been able to utter a word since the stroke, and although for a few days she had seemed better both mentally and physically, now she was worse.

  She was a ghost of the girl he had loved so much.

  In ten days the cottage had lost its sparkle. The little work Jane did was half-hearted and lackadaisical. Her eyes were dull. The doctors, including a London specialist who had since examined her, could find no reason for any of this, and if she did not show a marked improvement within the next week she was to go into hospital for observation.

  Larry’s sister was making heavy weather of looking after young James and the cottage.

  Larry stepped into the bright sunlight of Lauriston High Street. There was no one here whom he wanted to talk to, and he ought to hurry back to his work at Wide World Foods, but he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t free his mind from a fact which no one else seemed to have noticed.

  Both doctors had died after seeing Jane.

  It couldn’t be more than coincidence: but it would not let him alone.

  He took his bicycle from a parking place and cycled towards the Wide World Foods plant. He had a double job: storekeeper much of the time and emergency delivery van driver in the rest, taking supplies of various canned processed and deep frozen foods to shops and wholesalers in the Lauriston and Winchester districts.

  It was a little after twelve o’clock when he arrived, fifty minutes to lunchtime. He had brought sandwiches and meant to work through his lunch hour; he’d had far too much time off lately, and it wouldn’t help if he lost his job.

  Mr. Pettigrew, the Despatch Department manager, was sitting in his little office when Larry entered. Larry clocked in and went to get the documents he would need; records of goods which had been delivered and others which had been taken out of the different warehouses, where great stocks of foods were stored. He heard Pettigrew coming after him, on his little, sharp-sounding shoes. He did not like Pettigrew and knew that the manager had no liking for him; but they had mutual respect, for no other men had the same exhaustive knowledge of the stocks in the warehouse. Pettigrew was a little round-faced balding man, with a thin voice.

  “Oh, Larry.” He seldom used the Christian name, and that surprised Larry, who turned quickly.

  Pettigrew said: “I have—” and then stopped and gulped.

  He didn’t want to say what was in his mind, which meant that it was something unpleasant. Was it possible that Pettigrew had seized upon the fact of his recent time off to persuade the management to give him notice? A new kind of fear took hold of Larry.

  “Yes, what is it?” he asked curtly.

  Pettigrew moistened his lips. He certainly didn’t relish what he had to say, and if he started offering hypocritical condolences, that would be the last straw.

  “Larry,” Pettigrew said stiffly. “Have you had a message?”

  “No, what kind of message?”

  “I’m sorry,” Pettigrew said. “I sent it through to the main office, I hoped they—I’m sorry. It’s from your sister. You must get home quickly. Your wife has taken a turn for the worse.” He stood stiffly, as at attention, and it was easy to see the compassion in the eyes behind those rimless glasses. “Take as much time as you need, Larry. Your job will be quite safe, I have the management’s assurance on that. And you may take a van.”

  Jane died that evening; it was as if she had lost the will to live.

  Book II

  The Village of Silence

  Chapter Six

  A REPORT FOR DR PALFREY

  On the day after Jane Hill died, Dr. Stanislaus Alexander Palfrey sat at his large desk in his large, underground, air- conditioned office, and read the inquest reports in The Times and the Daily Globe. The Daily Globe carried pictures of the two doctors, as well as headlines about the inquest story. There was a photograph of Korven, in a rather thoughtful and pensive mood, and Palfrey studied this, his lips set a little tightly, as if what he was thinking was unpleasant. After a few minutes he put the newspapers down, and stood up and went to a steel filing cabinet in a corner. The cabinet could only be opened with the proper key. Anyone who tried to force it would succeed only in destroying the documents inside, for a self-igniting system was controlled, like so many things here, by electric impulses. Palfrey, a tall, lean man with a slight stoop, wearing a formal black coat and striped trousers, took out a manilla folder from a section marked K. He locked the cabinet again and took the folder to the desk. When he opened it, a much larger photograph of Dr. Korven lay in front of him.

  “All over, Abe,” he said, a kind of valediction. “I couldn’t be more sorry.” He glanced through the details on the papers in the file, details which showed that Wilberforce Abraham Korven’s past had been investigated with infinite thoroughness before he had been accepted as a member of Z5. There were five hundred such members, men and women, of all races, colours, nationalities and religions, a complete cross-section of the people of the world. East and West were represented; nationals of nations hostile to each other often worked together for Z5, which had first claim on their loyalty.

  Palfrey knew each agent.

  What was in some ways as important, each one knew and accepted his leadership, absolutely.

  Korven had.

  The Russian, Stefan Andromovitch, had for many years: and the American Cornelius Bruton, and many others.

  Israelis and Egyptians, Spaniards and Russians, Chinese and Japanese, French and Arab, all had representatives among the five hundred and two. Every nation contributed to the costs, even Russia, after a lapse of several years. It was simple fact that an agent would lay down his life for that obscure, little-known, often derided organization. Some years earlier, at the time of the great flood caused by the octi which had almost swamped the civilized world, an American journal with a vast circulation had published a story on Z5, and in many respects it had been very close to the truth.

  The salient points were these:

  This world-wide organization, with its headquarters in England, had started during the second World War as an Allied Secret Service, and discovered soon after the war that private individuals were striving to take advantage of the prevailing conditions to make great fortunes or to obtain great power. So Z5 had been commissioned to work against them, and over the years it had become truly international. Where nations quarrelled or fought, Z5 took no active part. Where the hyenas came to feed off the economic flesh of the victims of war, Z5 laboured hard. If one power supplied arms to another, that was outside the scope of Z5. If one particular great combine of arms manufacturers supplied those arms, then it was Z5’s affair.

  At first, few governments had taken it seriously.

  Today, all governments knew that it was a vital link between the world of yesterday and of tomorrow. Here was an age when power could be gathered into the hands of a few; when one or two men could conceivably control some new scientific secret which could cause death and disaster, or else bring economic ruin to the world. So Z5 was a kind of international secret service, forever on the lookout for people or things which might menace nations, or goodwill, or the future.

  Palfrey was its leader responsible to none but himself. And Wilberforce Abraham Korven had become a member only six months earlier. He had been born in Kenya, and as a youth, shown great gallantry against Mau-Mau. As reward, he had been brought to England to complete his medical training.

  Palfrey had great need of doctors.

  He marked the file and put it into another drawer, where there were records of many dead, then went back to his desk. He did not sit down. He did not like this undergro
und room, and much preferred one from which he could look out of the window into the street and see a little of the passing pageant.

  Here he felt stifled; yet his fellow agents had decreed that he was too precious for normal risks, insisted that his office should be impregnable, his records inaccessible except to Z5 members. There was so much to do that he spent a great deal of time here. It was easy to forget that he was married, that he had a twelve-year-old son, that he had once lived a free-and-easy social life. There were times when the restrictions imposed by the task were so repressive that he felt he would have to give it up, that someone else must take over, as he had once taken over from the Marquess of Brett.

  Then something like the death of Korven made him forget everything but the work.

  He lifted a telephone, and a man answered.

  “Hallo, Jim. Is Stefan in?”

  “Yes, he’s just finished a call to Beirut.”

  “Put me through to him, will you?” As Palfrey waited, his hand strayed to his thin, silky, golden hair and he began to twist a few strands round his forefinger, a habit which he had tried unsuccessfully to check over the years. He looked rather tired and perhaps a little weak; at first glimpse it was easy to believe that he had a stoop, a receding chin and a vacuous expression. He would have given that impression just then, but when another man spoke to him his whole mood and expression changed. Strength came into his face, a glint in his eyes, firmness in his voice.

  “Hallo, Stefan. Can you spare ten minutes?”

  “At once, Sap.”

  “Fine,” said Palfrey and rang off, smiled, then patted the strands of hair back into place, incidentally making an absurd little kiss curl, and pulled a note pad towards him. He wrote down half a dozen names, then lifted the receiver again.

  “Jim?”

  “Yes,”

  “Call Budapest, Pau, Cairo, Buenos Aires, New York and Aden, will you, and ask for reports on Case 37. I’d like ’em quickly.”

  “I’ll fix it,” promised the man named Jim.

  “Thanks.” Palfrey put down the receiver as the door opened. It was a door of rather more than average height, but the man who came in had to duck very low to avoid banging his head. He was not only tall but massive, a positive giant. Few people really believed in him when they saw him for the first time; it was like looking at an hallucination. His hair had once been dark but was now nearly snow white, giving a distinction which went well with his size. He was good-looking, despite his large features, but it was less his looks than his expression which was impressive, once one got over the shock of his hugeness.

  He looked contented; a good man, with something of the calm expression of a priest or an ascetic.

  He closed the door quietly.

  “Hallo, Sap,” he said, “I expected to hear from you.” He glanced at the newspapers on the big desk. “How are you?”

  “I think I’m very worried,” Palfrey said mildly.

  “I have yet to know the time when you weren’t. About Korven?”

  “Partly. We haven’t had a single report from any agent on Case 37, and that’s remarkable.”

  “How long has it been under review?” the giant asked. He dropped into an armchair made specially for him and stretched out fantastically long legs. His English was excellent, if at times a trifle pedantic; few would have suspected that he was a Russian. But Stefan Andromovitch was now Number 2 in Z5. “Three months?”

  “Eleven weeks,” said Palfrey. “I’ve just sent round for reports.”

  “Yes,” said Andromovitch, “you had to do that. Not a single report of any kind yet, you say?”

  “All completely negative,” Palfrey told him, and began to play with his hair again. “All we know is that Rondivallo disappeared thirteen weeks ago, and that one of his lights o’ love died after a throat infection which made her dumb and temporarily paralysed. There were some signs of oedema of the glottis, but that wasn’t the cause of death. We’ve had a man trying to trace Rondivallo’s movements in every place he’d visited in the previous twelve months and they might have been following a will-o’-the-wisp. And now Korven, who was trying to find out what Rondivallo did in the Forest of Conne, goes like this after seeing a woman who died from causes which were very like those of Rondivallo’s girl friend. I’ve seen the post-mortem report: it doesn’t help. We can’t trace the cause, the infection or anything.”

  “Sure there’s nothing else to find at Conne?”

  “Not on the surface, anyhow. I talked to the Yard last night. They’ve checked closely with the Lauriston police. Mitchison did the post-mortem on Mrs. Hill. It showed nothing except these vague signs of oedema of the glottis and signs of acute anaemia. All we’ve got to work on are the unknown people who attacked Dimmock, and the fact that Korven was last seen in Conne village. He wasn’t noticed on the other side of the forest, but almost certainly would have been if he’d driven through. We’ve had a close check made but can’t find any witness. Notice anything that it would be easy to miss about the whole thing?”

  Andromovitch said promptly:

  “Both dead doctors went to see the woman, Jane Hill, within a few hours of the seizure.”

  “That’s it.”

  “There is another angle,” Andromovitch said.

  “Tell me.”

  “Did this Jane Hill, did her husband, did Dimmock, know Rondivallo?”

  “Ah,” said Palfrey and alertness leapt back into his eyes. “Couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Yes. Well, we want someone down at Conne quickly. Any idea who?”

  “Matt Stone,” Andromovitch answered.

  “American, and an enthusiastic English countryside lover, yes. We’ll have him here this afternoon and go over everything with him,” Palfrey declared. “We’ll have time to prepare a briefing.” He lifted his telephone. “Jim, have Matthew Stone here at half-past two, will you? … Yes, through the shop … Thanks.”

  He rang off as Andromovitch stood up; Palfrey had to crane his neck to look at him.

  “I’m still trying to find out who’s breaking the oil pipeline in Jacca,” the Russian said. “Aly Senaddi is coming to see me at half-past eleven. I’ll let you know if there is anything useful to report.”

  “Fine,” Palfrey said, almost absently.

  When the door closed he sat quite still for a long time. The rather vacuous expression was on his face again; a few strands of the silken, golden hair stood out from his forehead. He stayed absolutely still until he jumped up and went to the filing cabinets. This time he took a file out of the bulkier S section— Stone, Matthew Charles, and carried it back to his desk. A full-face photograph showed an eager-eyed, youthful-looking man, probably in the early thirties. Profile, he proved to have a snub nose and a stronger chin than most, and very small ears; there was a merry look about him. He had short fair hair, which one photograph showed in a crew cut.

  Palfrey studied the typewritten details.

  Born: 1925, at Phoenix, Arizona, U.S.A.

  Journalist. Education: Phoenix High,

  Arizona University, special subjects

  English Literature, British History,

  North American history. Specialist

  abilities: Judo, ju-jitsu, boxing, cow-

  punching, fencing, ballistics, flying.

  Single.

  There were other details, including the years Stone had spent in the armed forces, mostly in the United States Air Force, a period of post-graduate study in Paris, Rome and London, the fact that he had settled at least temporarily in London. He had been brought into the service of Z5 at a time of urgent investigations into the activities of a so-called oil-drilling company in Arizona. As far as it was known, no one outside this building knew that he was a member of the department.

  He had the patience needed, as well as the ability to act s
wiftly. He would have to be told everything about the mysterious dumbness followed by anaemia and death, and told of all that had happened to Korven.

  Palfrey spent the next hour deliberating, but all the time there was one question at the back of his mind: what had happened to Korven, and what had he discovered? Would he have been killed if he hadn’t made some vital discovery?

  The telephone bell rang. Palfrey moved his hand towards it, hesitated, lifted it when it rang again, and said in a husky voice:

  “Yes, Jim?”

  He listened for a moment, and the metamorphosis came again. The hint of weakness and the suggestion of languor vanished, he looked younger, the expression in his eyes became alert and commanding.

  “All right, Jim,” he said. “I’ll get in touch with Budapest myself. Get me through.” He put the receiver down and flicked on an inter-office talking machine. “Stefan,” he said, “get the job you’re on parcelled up and handed over to someone else. We’d better both work on Case 37. There’s a report in from Budapest, but not direct from Cornell himself—from Raison who had to contact Cornell over another job. Cornell had a stroke yesterday. He was paralysed for twelve hours, but the paralysis seems to have gone, except in his throat. He’s lost his voice.”

  Andromovitch said slowly, softly: “Like the Hill woman.”

  “That’s right,” said Palfrey. “I’m going to talk to Raison, and we’d better get Mitchison flown out to Budapest, he’s the most likely man—all right, forget it, I’m talking to myself.” He flicked the talking machine off and lifted a telephone, almost in the same movement. “Give me Farraday, Jim … Hallo, Farry, listen. Cornell has had a stroke at his Budapest hotel. I want Mitchison to fly out and find out what’s caused it. See if Mitchison can go at once. Then find out from him who is the best man on the spot and arrange for that man to examine Cornell immediately. Fix everything for Mitchison: airplane tickets, hotels. Make it desperately urgent.” Palfrey rang off, but lifted the telephone again at once. “Jim,” he said. “Yes, I’ll hold on.” He was staring at the blank wall in front of him, and his eyes were hard, his lips set tightly. “Hallo, Jim, yes. Check all the others on Case 37. Send Gully over to Budapest to take over, he’s briefed on the case. Right? …Thanks.”