Free Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens by Michael Gilbert

of a prototype form of dianthromine.”
    “Remember, please,” said Mr. Behrens, “that you’re talking to someone whose scientific education never got beyond making a smell with sulphuretted hydrogen.”
    “Dianthromine is a non-lethal gas. It is light, and odourless, and it freezes the nerve centres of the brain, causing sudden and complete unconsciousness, which lasts from four to six hours, and then wears off without any side-effects.”
    “That sounds a fairly humane sort of weapon.”
    “Yes. Unfortunately the prototype had a delayed side-effect which did not become apparent for some days, when the subject went mad and, in most cases, died.”
    “How many people did we kill at Porton?”
    “We killed a number of rats and guinea-pigs. Then the defect was traced and eliminated.”
    “I see,” said Mr. Behrens. “Yes. How very fortunate. It was the experimental type that our traitor transmitted to Egypt?”
    “It would appear so.”
    “The traitor being Albert Rivers?”
    “That’s an assumption. He was one of four men with the necessary technical knowledge. And his security clearance is low. So low that I think it was a mistake to let him work at Porton at all. He’s a compulsive drinker, and is known to be having affairs with at least two women in the neighbourhood. He’s also living well above his means.”
    “If it’s him, how does he get the stuff out?”
    “That is the interesting point. He would appear to have devised an entirely novel method.”
    Mr. Behrens said, “Do you think it could be his wife? She goes abroad a fair amount to bridge congresses and things like that.”
    “It was one of the possibilities, but the Al-Maza incident proved it wrong. Porton knew about the side-effects of dianthromine at the beginning of August. We must assume that Rivers would have transmitted a warning as quickly as he could. Yet the fatalities in Egypt did not occur until the third week in August. By the end of the month they, too, had corrected the defect.”
    “So we’re looking for a message which takes two or three weeks to get through. It sounds like a letter to a safe intermediary.”
    “His post has been very carefully checked.”
    “Radio?”
    “Too fast. He’d have got the news out before the trouble occurred.”
    “Some form of publication – in code. A weekly or fortnightly periodical?”
    “I think that sounds more like it,” said Mr. Fortescue. “You’ll have to find out what the method is. And you’ll have to stop it. There are some things going on at Porton now which we would certainly not want the Egyptians to know about. Or anyone else, for that matter.”
    “I’ll have a word with Harry Sands-Douglas. He knows as much about codes as anyone in England. I can probably catch him at the Dilly Club.”
     
    The University, Legal and Professional Classes Club is never referred to by that full and cumbersome title. Its members long ago rechristened it the Dons-in-London, abbreviated to the DIL, or the Dilly Club. It occupies two old houses in St. John’s Wood on the north side of Lord’s Cricket Ground. It has the best cellar and the worst food in London, and a unique collection of classical pornography, bequeathed to it by the Warden of one of the better-known Oxford colleges.
    Mr. Behrens found the club very useful, since he could be sure of meeting there former colleagues from that group of temporary Intelligence operatives who had come, in 1939, from the older universities and the Bar, created one of the most unorthodox and effective Intelligence organisations in the world, and had returned in 1945 to their former professions, to the unconcealed relief of their more hidebound professional colleagues.
    “The idea which occurred to me,” said Mr. Behrens, “was that you might conceal a code in a bridge column.”
    Harry Sands-Douglas, huge, pink-faced, with a mop of fluffy white hair, considered the suggestion. He said, “Whereabouts in the column? In the hands