Tales of Mystery and Suspense – 25

by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

I so hugely enjoyed the Agatha Christie I borrowed from Madubashini Ratnayake that I was determined to take another when I next visited her.

I remember much about most Agatha Christies, but I found one that I recalled thinking quite splendid when I last read it. Although I knew who the villain was, there was much about the book that I could not remember, so I had no hesitation in choosing this one.

The book, N or M?, is set during the Second World War. I remembered that much, as well as its central theme: the unmasking of two German spies, codenamed N and M, a man and a woman described as Hitler’s most trusted agents. The task falls to Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, the entertaining husband-and-wife duo Agatha Christie created for their adventures during the First World War.

They fail to find employment in the Second World War, being deemed too old, but a man called Mr Grant visits them, sent by their former controller, whom they had known as Mr Carter. Grant talks confidentially to Tommy when Tuppence is called away by a friend, asking if he will go to a seaside hotel called Sans Souci in a place called Leahampton.

Grant’s agent had been killed in an accident, and had just managed to say ‘N or M. Song Susie’ before he died. A return ticket to Leahampton had been found in his pocket, which suggested the hotel.

Tommy gets there to find Tuppence in residence in the guise of a woman called Mrs Blenkinsop. She suspects something when Grant turns up and gets a friend to call her, but instead of going out she listens in and finds out what Tommy is up to.

And so Tommy and Tuppence have to work their way through a cast that we find in many Christie books. It includes a landlady, Mrs Perenna, who is Irish and whose husband, it turns out, was executed as a traitor during the First World War, around the time the British executed Roger Casement. Her daughter is in love with a German refugee who went to Britain; the Nazis had put his two brothers into concentration camps.

There is another blustering Irish lady, a retired Major, an anaemic woman with a baby, an even more anaemic man with a put-upon wife, and an acid spinster. Tommy plays golf with the Major and with Commander Haydock, a naval officer who lives higher on the hill and who endlessly tells the tale of how he made the police look into the German who had made adjustments to the house. The German decamped before he could be arrested, and thereafter Haydock bought the place. Over a drink he shows Tommy what the German has done, and how perfectly placed the house, named Smuggler’s Rest, was for signalling.

Tuppence has meanwhile noticed a strange woman, who looks vaguely familiar, hanging about the house. She asks after a man and then asks the German after another, but her purpose becomes clear when little Betty vanishes. Mrs Sprot is distraught, and the more so when a note is found in her room threatening that the baby will be killed if the police are informed. Lots of guests, including Commander Haydock, who is summoned for consultation on whether the police should be called in, pursue the woman and find her on a cliff path with the baby. The commander is too nervous to shoot, but Mrs Sprot, who has got the Major’s gun, fires and brings down the woman.

She is identified as a Polish refugee, who had come over with relations. Then, when Carl von Deinim’s room is searched, it is found that he is planning sabotage at the chemical factory where he works, and he is taken into custody. This follows much snooping: Carl and Mrs Perenna search Tuppence’s room, and Tuppence searches Mrs Perenna’s.

But then the story moves swiftly to a dramatic climax. Tommy, who is suspicious of the Major, raises the subject with Commander Haydock, who finally grants that the Major is perhaps too obviously British. He invites Tommy to his house, and there Tommy wonders if his butler might not be German. He mentions the words N or M, and the man drops a tray, drenching Tommy in crème de menthe.

Washing himself in the bathroom, he slips and bangs into the bathtub, which swivels round to reveal a transmitting set. Haydock sees this, but Tommy tries to pretend to be someone impressed by Haydock’s secret work for the government. He leaves the house then, glad that two other men are on the road to walk down with him to Sans Souci, but when he enters the gate he is hit on the head. Later we find him tied up in Haydock’s cellar, aware that he is dealing with two Germans.

Tuppence has been playing bridge with three other ladies that evening, and lots of people go out, while the blustering Irish lady comes in with a hammer she found. But then Tuppence has her own adventure, for a young man who has been working with her daughter turns up and tells her he is in the same business. Deborah had told him her mother was not with the aunt she was supposed to be staying with, and that she had been seen in Leahampton.

He is surprised that Tommy is also there, and not in Scotland as Deborah had thought. Tuppence tells him how she and Tommy communicate, and is not surprised to get a letter next day telling her to go to a station, from where a car takes her to the downs, where she sees the young man with a parachute. The parachute drop has brought a German, who has been captured, and Tuppence is told to go to the rendezvous in a town a few miles away, where the woman they are expecting is due.

Tuppence walks and finds herself in the house of a dentist, but it is Haydock who greets her, obviously knowing that both she and Tommy are government agents. When she refuses to tell him what she knows and he is about to shoot her, Mr Grant opens the door and shoots Haydock.

Tommy and Tuppence have summoned their faithful factotum Albert, who is scouting round Smuggler’s Rest when his whistling attracts Tommy’s attention, and a whistled SOS leads to Tommy’s rescue. Tuppence, meanwhile, has been suspicious because the young man did not know Tommy was with her. As she walks, she goes through something that lays a trail, and she is followed to the house, where she is rescued. But there it strikes her who the real villain is, and she rushes back with Mr Grant to set the seal on their triumph.

Extravagant coincidences and narrow escapes, but enormous fun. And Carl, the apparent German, turns out to be a British spy who took the place of his German friend, whom he had found dead. He realised he had been betrayed, and he thought this the best way of finding out why his friend was being allowed to leave, so that he could be the scapegoat, as it turned out, while the real spy at Sans Souci continued to function.