BIGGLES ON THE HOME FRONT

by Captain W. E. Johns

XV. THE END OF THE TRAIL (Pages 178 – 190)

“Night fell”. More time passes. Bertie and Algy then see Laxter walk to the aircraft and load two suitcases in the Auster. He then walks back to the house. Algy realizes that Laxter is leaving. “Somebody must be going with him. The Count probably. Neither of the suitcases was Biggles’! When that machine takes off he won’t be in it”. At nearly midnight they hear the Daimler return and car doors slam. Algy tells Bertie, “Stand by for a quick move. Things are likely to happen at any moment now, and when they do it's my guess they’ll happen fast”. In this he was right. Indeed, they happened faster than he expected. Laxter appeared, striding swiftly, the mechanics with him. He was now in flying kit and carried a small case. He got in the Auster. Algy and Bertie move nearer. “The hush carried the brittle quality of a time bomb”. Then two gunshots, muffled, are fired in quick succession. Carlton appears, walking quickly and carrying an attaché case. Laxter puts his head out of the cockpit to ask “Everything all right?” The count answered: “Yes. I shot them both. There was nothing else we could do with them”. “What about the car?” asked Laxter. “I’ve told the boys they can have it and do what they like with it. They’re on their way back to Town”. Carlton gives two packets of what was evidently money to the two mechanics telling them to “Get away from here as soon as you can and forget everything”. The engine of the plane starts. “With the sound of the two revolver shots in his ears Algy had stood like a man who had lost the use of his limbs. But now, he, too, came to life with a rush”. “This is it,” he rasped. “Come on. Stop ‘em. If they get off we’ll never see them again”. With their guns in their hands they dashed out of the bushes instantly to be involved in a state of wildest confusion. “Algy may have forgotten that the starting of the engine was to be the signal for Gaskin to launch his attack. If he remembered he ignored it. The one thought in his head was to prevent the machine from getting away. Subconsciously he heard a police whistle shrill. Vaguely he was aware of figures, running, converging on the aircraft. He paid no attention to them”. The Auster started to move as Laxter sought to save himself. The Count ran after the machine. Behind both was Algy. Bertie cut across in front of the machine and jumping sideways to avoid the airscrew, seized the Vee strut of the Auster at the root and strove desperately to swing the machine round towards the wood as the most effective way of stopping it. He then shot out one tyre and, as he fell, shot at another. “The machine did a short violent swerve as if trying to turn in its own length, at the end of which it turned a somersault and burst into flames”. The Count ran across the open field and then turned and fired two shots at Algy. Algy “was close enough to the Count to have hit him with a shot from his own gun, but he hesitated to take a step so drastic even though the Count had invited it. Instead, he fired a shot over the fugitive’s head, his intention being to warn him that he, too, was armed. To his dismay, not to say surprise, he saw the Count falter, slow down to a walk and then sink to the ground”. Algy ran up to find him apparently dead, or at any rate unconscious. He could see no wound. Leaving the Count with one of Inspector Gaskin’s men, Algy rejoins Bertie and the two of them rush toward the house, which they now see is on fire. Algy sees Gaskin charging round from the front. “Have you seen Biggles?” he yelled. “No,” answered Gaskin. “Wasn’t it him who started the plane?” “No. He isn’t out there. Nor is Ginger. They must be in this house”. The door to the house is locked but Gaskin “flung his sixteen stone against the door”, shoulder first, three times in order to break in. As it burst open smoke poured out. Holding his handkerchief over his mouth and nose, Algy gropes his way in and at once became aware of a great noise of hammering. Somewhere Bertie was shouting. “It’s this way! Over here!” In the blinding chocking smoke Algy finds Bertie groping his way along a wall from some part of which came the frantic hammering. Algy joins him. “His hands found a door. He groped for the handle and struck his knuckles on a key. He turned it, and with his senses reeling pulled it open. Two figures stumbled out, nearly knocking him over. “Is that you, Biggles?” he choked. “Yes”, gasped Biggles. As they move away, Algy stumbles over something soft laying on the floor. By feel he identifies the object as a dog, one of the Alsatians, presumably dead, since it did not move. Somehow they all managed to find the open door through which they fell, gasping. Gaskin says “My godfathers, (Even in these extreme circumstances, Johns can’t have a character say “My God!”), Bigglesworth, you nearly went too far that time. You’ll never have a closer squeak than that. “You’re telling me,” answered Biggles, ruefully, mopping his face with a dirty handkerchief. “And me,” muttered Ginger. “I’ve thought of several way of dying but I never expected to be smoked liked a perishing haddock”. “I thought you’d had it, anyway” asserted Algy. “Those two pistol shots, to me, could only mean one thing”. “The Count shot the dogs,” Algy continued, “He was pulling out and apparently didn’t want to take them with him”. “That was no excuse for shooting them, the swine,” growled Bertie. “Would somebody mind telling me what’s happened here, after all this?” requested Biggles. The position, as it was understood, was explained. “What happened to you?” asked Gaskin. Biggles smiled sadly. “Quite simple. The Count had worked out who we were and sent Laxter to bring us down for a party”. Bertie tells Biggles that he saw him in the car. Biggles asks about the whereabouts of the gang. “I can answer for Noble, Norman, Dusty and his pals,” replied Gaskin. “They did what you reckoned they’d do. There were two jobs; a smash and grab at a jeweller’s shop in Kensington and a raid on a film star’s flat in Mayfair”. Gaskin says that after the Daimler brought them back to the house “for the carve-up”, they were all arrested on leaving and they are now on their way to London in the van. Algy wonders why they didn’t shoot Biggles. “Why need they?” says Biggles. “Bullets in a body can be found. What the Count did, had it come off, would have been just as effective and left no traces of murder”. Ginger says that when the smoke started to come under the door, they soaked their handkerchiefs in wine and held them over their faces. They walk towards the field and meet a police sergeant carrying the Count’s attaché case. “The stuff’s all here, sir,” he reported. “There must be twenty or thirty thousand pounds in notes, too. It would have been a nice haul if he’d got away with it”. “Is he dead?” asked Algy. “Dead as mutton. He must have died o’shock. I couldn’t find a bullet hole anyway or I’d have rushed him to the county hospital”. “What about the two mechanics?” “We got ‘em”. “Did Laxter manage to get out?” inquired Algy. “No. We could hear him hollering but we couldn’t get near him for the heat,” answered the police officer with calm indifference. “Well, that’s what he tried to do to a man who thought he was a friend,” said Biggles quietly. “I’m beginning to think there must be such a thing as just retribution”. Gaskin says the gang picked up in the Daimler had a tidy wad of notes and from the serial numbers, he thinks the money has come from a bank robbery. “The Count may have organized that in his spare time”. A police car gives Biggles and his team a lift to Waterford, where Algy had left their own car. They then returned to their flat in Mount Street.

“A comparison of notes with Gaskin over the next two or three days yielded little that they did not know. A post-mortem examination revealed that the Count had not died from a bullet wound, as Algy had supposed, but in fact from a heart-attack, no doubt the result of shock, or exertion in his attempt to escape. Thus, in the end he died as he once faked his death. The notes both in the attaché case and in the pockets of the gang, were, as Gaskin had suspected, the proceeds of a bank robbery some weeks earlier. One rather humorous aspect of the final jewel robbery in Mayfair was this. The film star, to her astonishment, had her jewels returned to her, intact, before she knew they had been stolen. The story got in the newspapers and the Yard got a pat on the back for a change. Gaskin asks Biggles if he’d like to do some more work for them, but he declines. “I don’t care much for the atmosphere of places like the Barn”.