Cargo of Eagles by Margery Allingham

feel that it was time to cut him down to size.
    â€˜If you drove and talked a little more slowly,’ said Dr Jones, ‘I could take in more of the lecture. Abandon the Cockney accent which does nothing for your professional image and remember that I want to meet Hector, in one piece, at half past six.’
    â€˜Blast his smug go-getting guts.’ Morty was subdued but not defeated. ‘But I must get this off my chest. Bear with me, share my obsessions. Hear the fruits of my eager researches into this byway of history. If I’m incoherent the fault is yours. Do all your patients adore you, too?’
    â€˜Get on with your lecture.’
    â€˜If you say so.’ Morty reduced the elegant Lotus Elan to a legal limit. ‘But right now we are at the start of my discovery. New readers begin here: Mob’s Hole, a sort of roadhouse and open air barbecue, really existed, you know. Ned Ward, the London Spy, has a terrific description of it. It was bang in the middle of that heap of decaying ironmongery according to the old maps, and apart from being a picnic haunt of dubious café society, the sort of coxcombs, bullies, whores and pimps Wardwrote about, it was also notorious as a Safe House, if you know what that means.’
    â€˜I don’t, but no doubt I’ll learn.’
    â€˜You certainly will if you put up with me for long. Well now, a Safe House was an inn or a lodging with no questions asked. Suitable for thieves, smugglers, political refugees—anyone wanted by the authorities, in fact. You’ll find relics of them dotted all round the Thames Estuary. A man on the run was naturally afraid of the main roads with their big coaching inns because they were the obvious places to watch. The road block idea isn’t new. The Army, the Preventative Men, the thief catchers and so on have always used it since there was any sort of law. No, a man who wished to move secretly went, generally by night, from one Safe House to the next, making for a quiet part of the coast—some place where smuggling was regarded as being a proper trade and where inhabitants minded their own business.’
    â€˜Like Saltey?’ suggested Dido.
    â€˜You have it in one, my proud beauty. Mob’s Hole to Mob’s Bowl, in fact. This was the route and it runs through some pretty queer country as you’ll find out. London’s back door, with a couple of centuries of unemptied garbage pails still awaiting collection by the look of it. It’s a dreary run on the face of it but it has its charm for the likes of me.’
    â€˜An acquired taste no doubt. Do you include the romance of Gallows Corner and the Great Southend Road in your saga?’
    â€˜I can do better than that.’ Morty was still enthusiastic. ‘I can dodge both of them for you if you don’t mind a rough ride. Our eighteenth century friends didn’t greatly care for that ominous crossroads. They used a mixture of loops and short cuts. It’s not been easy to trace, and if I weren’t so brilliant, intuitive and hard-working I would never have found it. But now that this particular piece of research is completed I’ll tell you something which really is odd.
Highly remarkable
, as we say in Saltey.’
    â€˜Go on,’ said Dido. ‘Amaze me if you can. And keep bothhands on the wheel when turning sharp corners if you wish to remain just good friends.’
    â€˜Sorry.’ Morty was not penitent. ‘But this is genuinely odd. I was driving down from town last week rather late at night, after midnight in fact, and using my special route which is particularly impressive at night because once you’re dear of the streets there are miles where you hardly pass a house at all and you get a tremendous sense of loneliness.
    â€˜There I was, idling along—you know my style—when I was aware of someone behind whose headlights were shining in my mirror. I let him pass, making sure