Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens by Michael Gilbert Page A

are involved. I’m on rather good terms now with Mrs. King-Bassett.”
    “How did you fix that?”
    “I sent her an anonymous letter, giving her the ripest details of Albert’s liaisons with the airman’s wife at Boscombe Down. Then I called on her, with Rasselas. We all got on together famously.”
    “I don’t think,” said Mr. Behrens, “that he’s using either woman as a courier. In fact, I’m pretty certain that we know how he is doing it.”
    “Through the bridge columns?”
    “Yes. I had a telephone message after lunch. There’s a positive correlation. They should have the code finally broken by this evening. I gather the old man is already thinking about how to use it. He had the idea of sending them out something pretty horrific to try out next.”
    “If the messages are going out through this bridge column, does it mean that his wife’s in it too?”
    Mr. Behrens paused for quite a time before answering this. He seemed to be wholly engrossed in watching the falcons. The male had spiralled up to a height above the female and now plummeted down in mock attack. The female side-stepped at the last moment; the male put on the brakes and volplaned down almost to the transept roof.
    “No,” said Mr. Behrens at last. “It doesn’t. For two reasons. First, because it’s Albert Rivers who writes the bridge columns. His wife has no hand in them. I’ve found that out. By itself, it’s not conclusive. But it was a remark by her, about Albert being a scientist, which put me on to the key to the cipher. If she’d been guilty she’d never have done that.”
    “It seems to me,” said Mr. Calder, “that if we pull in Albert Rivers, simply on the basis of the code messages, we may be in for rather a sticky run. Fancy trying to persuade an average jury that something a computer has worked out on the basis of a few bridge hands constitutes treason.”
    Mr. Behrens said, “I once knew a Baconian. He was convinced that all Shakespeare’s plays were full of code messages. He demonstrated to me, very cleverly, that if you applied his formula to Hamlet’s soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be’, you could produce the sentence, ‘F.B. made me for Q.E.’; which meant, needless to say, ‘Francis Bacon wrote the play for Queen Elizabeth’.”
    “Of course.”
    “Sands-Douglas applied the same formula to a later speech and produced the message, ‘Arsenal for ye cuppe.’”
    Mr. Calder laughed. Then stopped laughing and said, “I’ve got a feeling we may have to consider an alternative solution.”
    “Was that why you broke into Colonel Crofter’s office and stole the dianthromine?”
    “How do you know I stole it?”
    “It had to be either you or Rivers. You were the only two disreputable characters in the neighbourhood. He had no need to steal it. He could have got some legitimately. So it must have been you.”
    “What a horrible mind you have got,” said Mr. Calder.
     
    Albert Rivers leaned back in his chair in the mess ante-room, lit a cigarette which he extracted from a packet, and put the packet back in his pocket. As an afterthought, he took it out again and offered it to the two men sitting with him. Both shook their heads.
    “You’re a civilian yourself, Corker,” he said.
    “It’s Calder, actually.”
    “Calder. I beg yours. I never remember a name for five minutes. Never forget a formula, but never remember a name.”
    “Perhaps that’s because formulas are often more important.”
    Rivers squinted at Mr. Calder as though he suspected the remark of some deep double meaning, then laughed and said, “You’re damned right they are. What was I saying?”
    “You were pointing out that I was a civilian. I imagine that goes for the majority of the people here, too.” As Mr. Calder said this he looked round the room. Most of the diners had disappeared to their own quarters, but there was a hard core left. Four were playing bridge with silent concentration. Two younger men were drinking