BIGGLES IN THE BLUE

by Captain W. E. Johns

IV. EVANS WAS WRONG (Pages 61 – 72)

Biggles and Ginger slowly made their way back to the car. “I think it was a sound idea, leaving the keys with Evans,” opined Biggles. “Any of us may want them at any time and they’ll be on the spot”. Biggles and Ginger talk about the case. They suspect that von Stalhein may have found Hagen’s camera. Any photographs of flamingo’s nests would show a background beyond, a landscape, that would reveal the identity of the island. Ginger says they could ask Evans if he knows where Hagen took his photographs to be developed. They sit in their car and Biggles has a cigarette. “Amazing how things work out, isn’t it?” says Biggles. “Little did Hagen imagine that having an ornithologist for a neighbour was likely to lead to the exposure of what he had been at such pains to conceal. He’d turn in his grave if he knew that he had been given away by a bird’s egg – of all things. For unless I’m duly optimistic, that egg is going to narrow our search, and maybe in the end lead us to what we’re here to find”. Biggles reaches for the starter when the silence is shattered by a scream full of terror. Biggles and Ginger get out and run to Rumkeg Haven. The French windows are open. They run in and Biggles shouts “Lookout!” jumping to one side and grabbing a fishing rod. He starts lashing at the ground. Ginger sees a brown snake with dark markings edged with greenish-yellow. “Evans lay huddled on the floor, one knee drawn up, one arm over his face”. Biggles aims a smashing blow at the reptile but the fishing-rod snaps off short. The snake escapes under a big armchair. Biggles tries to poke it out and it goes straight for Ginger, who jumps on a chair. Ginger grabs a second fishing rod and hits out at the snake but catches a hanging lamp causing it to shatter. The snake goes under a sofa and remains there. Biggles rasps “Evans is likely to die while we’re fooling about like this”. The snake comes out of its hiding place and they try to hit it with various blows, but it escapes out of the open window and disappears in the jungle of weeds in the garden. Biggles takes Ginger’s pen knife and makes two incisions on Evans’s leg, one across the other. He then sucks the wound and spits out the venom extracted. Ginger is told to give Evans brandy or whisky and finds a decanter to do so. Biggles shakes Evans, “Wake up. Do you hear me? Wake up”. They try to get him up and moving. Biggles tells Ginger to dash into town and get a doctor and an ambulance. “Ginger went off at the double, tore into the town, and by great good fortune spotted a military ambulance” He tells the corporal driver what has happened. Ginger dashes back to Rumkeg Haven and ten minutes later an ambulance arrives and a medical officer gives Evans a shot of serum. “We’ll get him to hospital,” said the doctor. “Lucky you were about. You did well. He’s got a chance”. Evans is stretchered away. “That snake was no accident,” declared Ginger in a hard voice. “It was fer-de-lance, I recognised it from Evan’s description. I understood him to say that the snake wasn’t a native of Jamaica, which means that it must have been planted here”. Biggles agrees but doesn’t think it was von Stalhein that did it. “Yet I admit it’s queer that he should have warned us of snakes. The implication is that he knew someone who had the snake, someone who wouldn’t be above slipping it out way”. Biggles points out a broken lower pane in the glass door that opens onto the garden. He says it wasn’t broken when they first came here, or if it was, he didn’t notice. The egg that Evans had gone to get lies smashed on the floor. “If he lives we’ll get him another” says Biggles. They go back to their car, with a watchful eye out for the snake. As they cruise down the road, they see a figure. “It was a tall negro with peg-up trousers and a slim-waisted jacket”. Ginger recognised him at once. “Napoleon, the Communist from the Dunghill, the pal of von Stalhein’s pal”. Biggles lips came together in a hard line. “The Saga Boy from Trinidad – Trinidad, where snakes are common”. As they pass by, the man gives them a flashing smile and sweeps off his hat “in a salute so exaggerated that it was obviously intended to be insolent”. Biggles drove on. “I hope one day to put a different expression on that rascal’s face,” he said quietly.