With intent to deceive, p.1
With Intent to Deceive, page 1
With Intent to Deceive
by Manning Coles
First published in 1947
This edition published by Rare Treasures
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WITH INTENT TO DECEIVE
by Manning Coles
To Kenneth Carney
of the police department
for his guidance through the intricacies
of police procedure
Cast of Characters
James Hyde. A fifty-year-old retired tanner who longs for adventure.
Hugh Selkirk. A British subject who has long lived in Argentina. He and James Hyde bear a striking resemblance to one another.
Robert Adam. Selkirk’s very resourceful manservant.
Alexander Nairn. James Hyde’s solicitor.
Mrs. Watson. Hyde’s repressive housekeeper.
Ribbentrop. The Nazi whose stolen treasure started it all. He had several hundred thousand pounds stashed in an Argentine bank.
Bill Dodds. A plainclothes detective with an observant brother-in-law.
Manuel Varsoni. A member of the notorious Gatello gang. Italian by birth, he and the other members have been living in Argentina, with designs on the Ribbentrop loot.
Thomas Elphinstone Hambledon. A British intelligence agent.
Chief-Inspector Bagshott. Of New Scotland Yard, a friend of Tommy’s.
Walter Race. Hyde’s weaselly cousin, his only living relative.
William Forgan. A modelmaker who has a shop on the Clerkenwell Road.
Archibald Henry Campbell. Forgan’s partner. Both are friends of Adam’s.
Pietro Gatello, Giuseppe Mantani, Angelo Gatelo, Ramon Jacaro, Pacorro Pagote, Cesar Mariposa, and Tadeo El Caballero. The other members of the Gatello gang.
Konrad Hommelhoff. Another Nazi, with designs on Ribbentrop’s loot.
Plus assorted servants, landlords, neighbors, and police personnel.
Chapter One. Hyde for Leather
When James Hyde was a very small boy, he learned from his father to pause by the landing window on the way down to breakfast and sniff the morning breeze; when it brought with it a certain acrid tang it meant rain, for the wind was in the west. It was some time before he learned with surprise that the west wind did not smell like that always and everywhere, and that the scent was not, as it were, intrinsically west, but actually tannery. What is more, the faint aroma which hung about his father’s clothes when he returned home in the evenings had the same origin, for old Tom Hyde was a tanner like his father before him, and intensely proud of a long-established and respectable family business. When James was six years old, which was in 1901, he was taken as a birthday treat, in the high dogcart his father always drove, to visit the works for the first time. The wind was in the west that day, and as they clattered through the streets of Yeovil the smell grew steadily till, when they swung through the yard gates, it was as strong as a sheet of color and nearly tangible.
When the dogcart pulled up at the office door James was lifted down to be introduced to elderly men who said, “So this is the young master. Well, well,” and beamed upon him. James was dumb with embarrassment, for he was a shy child; he stared about him because it was easier to look at strange things than strange people, and the men laughed and said it was plain to see he was one of the noticing kind. After which he was taken through queer sheds with large tanks in the floor where skins lay soaking in dark liquid, across yards where more skins hung upon wooden frames to dry. There was a great barn filled with rough bark piled up and giving off a pleasant woodland smell.
“Oak bark, my boy,” said Tom Hyde. “That’s what we tan the hides with. We soak the bark in water to make tan liquor, very like the way your mother makes tea in the teapot. Then we soak the hides in the liquor; you saw that going on in those sheds with the tanks in the floor. When they come out of that they’re nearly leather. Understand?”
James nodded silently.
“Not got a lot to say, has ’e?” said the foreman. “One of them as thinks a lot, like the parrot.”
“Rather overcome by so much novelty I fancy,” said his father. “Chatters like a magpie at home, don’t you, James? Well, what d’you think of it all now you’ve been all round? Eh?”
“It’s—it’s a very loud smell, isn’t it?” said James, and was half pleased and half abashed to find he had said something funny.
“Very healthy smell, my boy. That’s why we all live so long, we Hydes. Never get consumption when you work in a tannery.”
There followed many other visits to the tannery as time went on; the high dogcart was laid aside for a car, and James went to school where the boys called him Sixpence because his father was a tanner and he would be one himself when he was old enough. He thought it strange that his mother would never visit the works; his father made excuses for her: the smell was too strong, the works were no place for a lady, she was not well enough to stand about or tramp from place to place. James pitied her for missing a treat and was dumbfounded when he learned that she hated the place. She was large and placid, completely devoted to her husband and the one child of their middle-aged marriage, but she would have no contact with the business. James discovered by degrees that she was a very innocent snob and amused herself by believing that the Hyde family was once great and had tragically fallen in the social scale. “My husband’s ill-starred forbears,” she would say, and glance sadly at purchased engravings of the saturnine faces of Laurence Hyde, Charles Il’s Rochester, and of the prim lawyer whose daughter was the wife of a Stuart and the mother of two queens of England. Tom Hyde laughed at her without unkindness and even allowed her to christen their son James Clarendon. “ ‘What’s in a name?’ “ he quoted, feeling quite cultured for once. “She could have called you Shakespeare Tudor if she wanted to. I fear I am a sore trial to your mother. Women cherish these pretty ideas, boy, but men have no time to waste on them.”
“Isn’t it true, then?” said James timidly.
“True? Lord, no. My grandfather was a journeyman harness maker who married the tanner’s daughter, wise man. My father always said the name of Hyde was a nickname because he dealt in ’em, I don’t know. Nor care. It’s a good name now, with a sound reputation for fair dealing, that’s all I trouble about.”
James left school and went into the business with a good deal of young enthusiasm. He had ideas about advertising; he invented slogans, “Hyde for Leather,” “Say Leather, Say Hyde,” and was immensely proud when they were printed on the billheads. There was a harness-making shop attached to the tannery; when harness declined in fashion and orders fell off, James persuaded his father to start a factory for fancy leatherwork: handbags, belts, wallets, and so forth. This succeeded, and another factory was opened to make luggage. James discovered a strain of his mother’s romance developing in him at the sight of long shelves full of kit bags, Gladstone bags, cabin trunks, suitcases, and fitted dressing cases, ready to be taken down and go all over the world on errands of peace and war. War Office contracts for Sam Browne belts and leather equipment… . Sometimes luggage would come back to be repaired, plastered over with colorful labels from marvelous hotels beside dazzling blue seas.
James grew fidgety. Surely the world was full of marvels, and the years went by without his seeing any of them or going anywhere. One could not count the decorous annual fortnight spent at Eastbourne with an aging mother increasingly dependent upon him and still depreciatory of the noisome tannery. “I always wished you to enter one of the learned professions, my dear. A lawyer, perhaps; it is in your blood, you know.”
“It may be in my blood, Mother,” laughed James, “but I’m sure it isn’t in my head. You want brains to be a lawyer.”
“That may be. But I didn’t want you to spend your whole life being a tanner. Now, suppose you were to stand for Parliament—”
James Hyde was beginning to think that he, too, disliked the idea of a whole life as a tanner. But old Tom Hyde, who had been forty-seven when his son was born, now leaned heavily upon him. As the old man’s physical strength abated his strong will increased. James was trusted and beloved but also kept under and made to work, work, and keep on working. Since he was a key man in an important industry, even two world wars failed to open the doors of his prison. It was still a private business; no nonsense about a Limited Company for old Hyde, with annual meetings of shareholders telling him how to conduct his affairs, no. Never. It was much easier to keep a tight hand over the business himself and tell James what he ought to do, even after the old man became too infirm to go down to the office every day.
James’s mother died in her sleep one night early in 1940, before the air raids became severe, before she had time even to miss the annual visit to an Eastbourne spoilt by barbed wire and mysterious defense works. She died, and James was still a tanner. He was getting very tired of it, but there in the background old Hyde remained, like a rock half submerged by the rising tide of years, but still hard and obstinate. “James, bring the order books home tonight, we must go through them. James, show me that contract before you sign it. James, have you answered that letter from Harrods? James—”
And James controlled himself till he thought he would never be able to relax even if th
Tom Hyde, tough as the leather he made, was ninety-eight when he died; it was some weeks before James even began to stretch his stiff mind and think that now he could please himself. What finally awoke him to startled life was an interview with the family solicitor.
“I asked you to come and see me, James, to go through your father’s estate with me and perhaps discuss what you would like to do about it.”
“Do?” said James. “I don’t know that it will be necessary to do anything particular, will it? Things can go on as they have always done, can’t they?”
“They can, of course,” said the lawyer with a laugh, “if you want them to. You mean to go on working the business yourself, do you?”
James nearly said, “Yes, of course,” and just stopped himself in time. It seemed almost as though he heard rusty bolts being pulled back and a key rattling in a disused lock, and his first emotion was more terror than relief. “I—what had you in mind?”
“I suppose you know the extent of your father’s estate?”
“No,” said James, and his heart began to thump.
“You don’t? Well, I am surprised. However, I have prepared a brief statement here which gives the outline in round figures, subject to correction in detail. After sundry legacies to old employees and men who have been in his service for a specified number of years—very generous legacies, too—the capital sum remaining, excluding the estimated value of the business, after payment of death duties, is in the neighborhood of half a million.”
“Good heavens,” gasped James.
“Say, fifteen thousand a year before, of course, payment of income tax and supertax.”
“Good gracious!”
“Added to which is the annual income from the business.”
“Great Scott!”
“You seem surprised,” said the lawyer blandly. “Surely you must have known that the business was making profits at a far greater rate than could be absorbed by the very modest style in which you lived?”
“I suppose you think I’m a fool,” said James humbly. “The fact is that until quite recently I did not handle the financial side, not as a whole, I mean. And being a private business, the accounts were never made public. Father employed an accountant who reported to him, and it wasn’t my business—I mean, I didn’t deal with it—I mean, if I’d asked, no doubt—”
“I know what you mean. I haven’t had dealings with your father for upwards of forty years without learning what he was like. Let it go at that, he was an honest and good man, and it was, as you say, his business. I must confess, I was curious to see whether you would want to go on attending the office every day for the rest of your life, or whether you would—er—wish to make changes.”
“I think,” said James, rising to his feet and pushing his chair back, “I think I’ll start by going for a walk. I feel I’d like some fresh air. No aspersions on your office ventilation!”
“My dear James, do you good.”
“I’ll go along the Fosseway to Sparkbrook, and round by Minchfield, and pick up the bus at The Jolly Sailor. By that time—”
“My dear James, I’ve known you since you were a schoolboy, so please don’t take offense if I say something—”
“Of course not. What is it?”
“Walks are so much more fun, James, if you don’t know exactly where you’re going.”
“Are they? I must try. Spontaneity is what you recommend, is it?”
James Hyde opened the office door and walked out into the sunshine, increasingly conscious, as he walked, of other doors which had opened wide for the first time in his life. He was free, he could sell the business, he could travel if he wanted to—he could live somewhere else, buy a house, run a car not merely for business, go where he liked—anywhere, so long as it didn’t smell of a tannery …
He sold the business and was startled by the price he received. Then he sold the house where he had lived ever since he was born. He had certain qualms over this; it was the home of his lifetime and he was attached to it if only from habit, for it was very ugly. But an inward voice warned him that he would never be free while he sat in the same rooms on the same chairs, and slept in the same bed. He looked for the first time with observant attention at the furniture and saw that it was bad; bought by the suite in the worst period of Victoria. He sold that, too, keeping only a few pieces which he cherished, and the portraits of Edward and Laurence Hyde, Earls of Clarendon and Rochester respectively. Not because he wished to claim relationship, but simply because they reminded him of his mother.
Then he went to London, walked into a house agent’s office in Kensington High Street, and announced that he wished to buy a house.
“Er—in any particular district, sir?”
James had no very definite prejudices about the district except that it should be of a residential, not business, character. The house agent looked at the kindly, anxious face, the undistinguished figure, the sedate clothes, and said to himself, “Made his pile in the war, E.P.T. or no, and just retired. Wants a complete change.” He offered James a photograph of a reinforced concrete house at
Sunningdale, with a flat roof, flat sides, and flat steel windows. Hyde looked at it without enthusiasm.
“Compact,” said the house agent. “Easily run. Every modern convenience, central heating, hot and cold in all—”
“It looks like a golf-club house to me,” said James, and dropped the photograph.
A gabled residence at Wembley. A castellated residence at Bushey. A tiled-fronted house at Wimbledon.
“I am so sorry,” apologized James. “I suppose the trouble is that I have no very clear idea in my own mind of what I want.”
“There is a house at Putney for sale, but it is furnished. It would be sold complete as it stands with everything in it, but perhaps you would not care—you have furniture already, perhaps?”
“No,” said Hyde. “I shall have to buy furniture anyway.”
He went to Putney and looked at the house, which stood back from the road with a short drive between laurels to the front door. It was built of brick and covered with stucco; it had a pillared porch and large sash windows symmetrically arranged. The furniture was excellent in quality if undistinguished in design; James was sure he would feel at home there. He bought it; the house agent introduced him to a firm which supplied him with a reliable staff of servants—money can do almost everything—and James moved in. He was happy for several weeks. Then it occurred to him suddenly one day that the reason why the house seemed homelike was because it was merely an improved edition of the old house where he was born, and the furniture looked friendly because it was the same sort of furniture he had always had. Plainer and better, but out of the same book. James could have cried.
His housekeeper gave him an inferiority complex, she was so very capable. She was the type who, desiring fresh employment, advertises for “a situation as housekeeper to single gentleman or widower,” aware that a man is easier to manage than a woman, less knowledgeably critical about household matters or less courageous in expressing criticism. She managed James who, like the devils in Scripture, believed and trembled. She advised him about his clothes, she educated his taste in food, she chose his wines. Hyde began by being humbly grateful and became gradually exasperated.
He took to dining out at night to show his independence, trying one restaurant after another until he found one on the fringe of Soho where they grilled a steak as he liked it grilled, and the headwaiter recognized him the third time he came. It was not long before he had an accustomed table and the headwaiter would pay him a visit to see that all was well and to recommend what he thought Hyde would like.
