ASHES OF LIGHTNING

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 65, Issue 43, 30 November 1944, Page 7

ASHES OF LIGHTNING

Serial Story:

Industrial Adventure.

(BY VINCENT CORNIER). I

(Copyright).

CHAPTER XV. HERE WAS PEACE. At last definite proof had been obtained on the score of Helme’s connection with Germany . . and if Helme the rat, were guilty, why not Flanagan, the wild boar, also? Altogether Moreton enjoyed his sleepy meal. When it was ended he found cause for further enjoyment. Carol Gilroy, looking lovely in the clear October sunshine, appeared. “Well, and how is Mr Giles Moreton, or whatever they call him, really,” she laughed, “feeling to-day? Tired, I expect?” “By jove, I am, Carol. Absolutely worn out. Thank the lord there’s no night-shift for me again, to-night. I hear the whole plant’s being closed down temporarily.” “Yes,” Carol soberly returned, “it has! Just as we’d got right into our stride with the new boxes, too.” “Sh-h!” Moreton grinned. “Careless talk, y’know. You’ve heard me variously described, so you’ll have to be “Let that nonsense stop right now, Giles!” Carol pretended to be stern. “You’ve come unstuck. All is known, so you can’t thrill me any more with your sinister mysteries.” That certainly out-faced Moreton. “Oh . . . is it? Now, who has been letting cats get free? General Hardisty?” “Yes, he has!” Carol’s eyes danced. “He’s a perfect wizard of strategy, Giles. Do you know, he came home with me last night and so charmed Daddy that the pair of ’em sat mumbling and laughing together until the small hours. And, between them, they have mapped out your immediate future.”

“But—but I don’t quite follow. What-—*'' “Listen! A camouflage has been arranged. A military post has been contrived in an empty house in the Cathedral Close . . . that’s the excuse to Hellersfield, for the continuous parade of sentries.” “Of sentries? Carol —sentries, in the Close?”

“Yes. Actually they’re guarding our house. And Daddy has sent me to offer you hospitality—you can have either of my brother’s rooms—for as long as you like. The—the General suspects danger. He wants us both kept under surveillance.” She surveyed Moreton’s incredulous face, then, ver'y earnestly, “Please, Giles . come home!”

The Gilroy’s house in Cathedral Close proved to be a gracious sanctuary. Moreton relaxed and gave himself up to enjoyment of its charms. He had never known a place quite like it. The serenities of the mid eighteenth century, in which period it had been built, seemed to invest its every air. Tall windows with scalloped fanlights, panellings in Wedgewood blue and others of dim golden oak; sheen of mahogany, shimmer of silver, glowing canvases, all contributed to tranquility. Insensibly, Moreton lost those intolerant moods of his. John Gilroy also helped to conquer them. He had not practised as a lawyer for thirty years without the faculty of searching into men and deciding about them. In his opinion-Giles Moreton had been living on his nerves. The youngster was a mass of conflicting elements: sensitive, dreamy, beautyloving, yet realistic in his interpretation of duty. ‘ So Gilroy smoked his pipe and watched his marrows and puffed smoke into late roses, ruminating. When he made up his mind he took himself off to the General for a talk . . Days were passing without any further progress being made in the mystery of the saboteurs. The Lowood factory was closed down, indefinitely. A second bombing raid had resulted in a cracked floor for the assembly department and the severance of a ten thousand volt high-tension cable. Piers and pillars, supporting the machineshop, had been jarred out of truth, anu some fifty machines, grinders, drillers and bobbers, needed re-bedding. Moreover, the moorland fire still menaced the plant. With wind veering to the north-east, the creeping seams of burning soft coal and peat succeeded in tunnelling beneath the static water of the great ditch which the troops had made. Retreating before half a dozen subterranean fires —rumbling and glowering corridors of awful flames —more and deeper saps had to be driven, and more waters diverted, until the troops battled with their unusual enemy within four hundred yards of the works’ boundary.

Twice in a week Moreton was summoned to conference with his superior officer. He returned from these, his mind a turmoil, to the quiet and the healing of'that house in Cathedral CIOSG. He had been shown figures . . . the alarming debit records of totallysuspended production . . . and they sickened his spirit. A major battle could not have taken a greater toll of armoured vehicles than this masssabotage. Although the multitudinous drawings were being triplicated and although other plants were being speeded up into wider production, the fact remained that Lowood —laid out exactly , and engaged for over half a century on the specialised production of gears—could no more be duplicated than it could be replaced. Apart from the massive aggregation of working-plant, some of it unique in the world, the most skilled of personnel was concentrated in the aiea, and diffusion of these experts throughout other works would prove a welbnigh fatal weakening of effort. The ugly truth had to be recognised through Flanagan and his toady, Helme, the enemy had struck an almost paralysing blow at the very heart of the industry. Moreton, sometimes, used to imagine what would happen if ever he found himself within striking distance of either. And, sweating with fury he would pray that the ordinances of duty, in such an eventual encounter, would preserve him from the murderlusts he knew lurked in his soul — “Black again, Carol,” old John slowly said to his daughter, after watching Moreton pull out of one of these sombre moods. "By George, but

he’s going through it! I lon’t believe a dyed in-1 lie-wool Nazi could be more of a fanatic.”

“I—l know, Daddy.” Carol was intensely worried; fearing in her secret mind that her father was receiving the worst possible impression of the one she loved. “It’s quite terrible, the way he :; taking it all to heart.” “Better by far,” Gilroy robustly declared, “he does so, than play the dilettante.” He sighed and mused, with a far-away wistful gleam in his eyes. “I —I was after his stamp, years ago, though I’m sure you’ll find that hard to believe. We were very poor at the outset, with a family practice sucked as dry as an orange. Each cause I took up I worried on like a dog. Your mother understood—and let me be. But,” and he spoke proudly, “thank God she lived to see her patience rewarded. The fiercer the storms of youth, my dear, the calmer and more confident one is when the middle seas are reached” —still that wistful looking—“and the tides move towards sunset.”

“Daddy, you don’t know liow grateful I am for your telling me this. I—l was afraid.”

That low rich chuckle of his. “Afraid, Carol, that this intense young man of yours was wearing out both my approbation and my patience —eh?” “Yes.”

“Well, forget your fears, my dear. I’m not easily mistaken in my assessments, and the youngster appears to me to be primed with the right stuff.” The girl’s relief was so pathetically obvious that Gilroy was flushed by a queer tinge of remorse. “Perhaps, Carol, I ought to have said something like this earliei-. And so I would have done, ‘but that the scrambling and unquiet time did push it out of farther question.’ There, you’ve got me into my bad habit of quoting Shakespeare again! Off with you; go and play to him” —his smile .was tender. After a while Moreton quietly entered . . . drawn by the diffident ghost of Schubert, yearning from eternity for the winds and the lilacs and the jonquils of some Maytime in Vienna, when he had caught them by his genius into an immortal serenade.

Now- it came to pass that the sun of Captain Roger Calthrop arose in all its splendour-. He had chafed under Moreton’s apparently effortless mastery of the whole situation. “Chafed” is not enough; he had experienced, quite despondently, an overwhelming sense of inferiority. Fate, he considered, had played him a shabby deal. What effective cards had oeen, had stacked themselves, completely, for the Secret Service man. His own.hand had been meagre—foul. Then he noticed Flanagan’s best pair of boots . . . Unlike Helme, Flanagan had not returned to his lodgings. His personal possessions had not been desUoyed, and the Security Police had taken them. For a man in Flanagan's wellpaid position there was. little. Three suits, a raincoat, four pairs of boots and shoes, and a scanty assembly of linen and hosiery, completed the haul. There were neither papers nor letters of any kind.

Calthrop was attracted by the look of those boots. They had a squaresoled, unusual, shape about them; an oddly “official” look. Turning them, over, he noticed that small steel plates were sunk into the heels —not on- the outer edges, to prevent wear, but on the inner curves. A man shod with the boots, standing to • attention, c would have those semi-heel plates touching. Caltln’op exulted. /He had not onehundredth part of the knowledge of Nazi Germany that Moreton possessed but he had enough to inform him, accurately, of the purpose of those plates. “I’ve got spurs that jingle-jangle-jingle,” he jocundly hummed, as he picked at one of the plates with a jackknife. “L’ll bet anything I’m right!” And he was right. Excepting the lowermost covering of leather, ' the heels were of wood —boxwood at that. The steel plates had covered small cavities cut into this wood —identify ing “Flanagan” as the German officer of some crack corps, in all probability the Schutz-StEffel; an S.S. man of the Nazi “inner-ring.”

Much after the same fashion as byegone cavalryman used to fit a pair of thinly-filed sixpences into their spurs, instead of rowels, in order to make a musical clink as they walked, so these boots with their sounding-board heels. A heel-clicking Nazi, wearing them, would revel in the smartly effectivfe detonations they Svould make . . . A German officer’s hand-made boots —what else? Calthrop had all the clothes submit-, ted to expert, microscopical examination. Within three days he received an astounding report. Suit labelled “A”, the best of the three, was of foreign build. Its fabric was, commercially unknown in Britain —a “Silesian merino,” probably woven in Lodz, Poland, before the war. Dust and fragments extracted from it showed that it had been frequently worn in an area in which a certain kind of tobacco is grown and the yellow limestone known as dolomite prevails. District defined as that bounded by the Rhine, the Main, and the second-class Ludwigs Canal, connecting Bamberg with Ratiston on the Danube. Here was evidence complete that “Flanagan” was a German! Of the suits “B” and “C” an even more astonishing report was received. Neither was the personal property of the man who had worn suit "A”. “Flanagan” was swarthy; the suits “B” and “C” had been worn by a man with violently "carroty” liair .... a man, moreover, who hailed from Aus tralia.

Seeds of ergot and lucerne had been found in the trousers’ turn-ups and these were of such a precise genre that they could be identified, without any possibility of doubt, as having been grown on the sheep-reaving savannas of Queensland, or west of the Eastern Australian highlands, “between,” the report formidably dedaled, “the isohyets of fifteen to thirty inches” .... outside tropical areas, where meadow-growing rainfall was reliable and annually constant. Best of all, a tie was found to bear the tab of a hosier in Sydney . . and, on the waistband lining was a redthreaded device, “X.C., No. 1972 V,” a dry cleaner’s tally, also of Sydney. Cables and short-wave radio systems were set to work. (To be Continued). The characters in this story are entirely imaginary. No reference is intended to any living person or to any public or private company.