BIGGLES AND THE NOBLE LORD

by Captain W. E. Johns

5. BIGGLES IS NOT IMPRESSED (Pages 42 – 51)

“That’s the place, straight ahead. You can see the wall that runs all round the estate, so you can’t make any mistake.” The speaker was Algy, and the time a little before ten on the morning following the events on the Great North Road. Algy is sitting next to Biggles as he flies “the old Air Police Auster, now beginning to look its age but still reliable enough for operations near home”. Bertie was in the back seat. “Ginger, still somewhat self-conscious of his dark skin – which he had found harder to take off than put on – had been content to remain on telephone duty at the office”. Biggles flies straight across the estate, looking for any signs of the “chopper”. He is suspicious of a biggish building on the open ground near the Hall. Algy thinks it is cattle pens for the buffalo, “I doubt if they’d survive an English winter in the open”. They take photographs from the air. A sudden backfire from the engine startles Algy. “We’re in trouble” says Biggles and he makes a forced landing in the grounds of the Hall, some 20 or 30 yards from the building they had been discussing. Biggles gets out to fiddle with the engine and it allows him time to look at the building in question. It has no windows. A Land-Rover drives up from the main house with two men and the passenger cheerfully inquiries if they are in trouble. “He was a big man, tall and board-shouldered. Clean shaven, and with what might have been called an open countenance, he wore an old tweed jacket and a deerstalker cap”. Biggles says that some fool mechanic left a terminal not properly screwed up, with the result that the connexion had come adrift. The man invites them all to the house for sherry and says his name is Lord Malboise. He introduces his younger brother Clarence as the man driving the Land-Rover. Malboise says his animals aren’t reliable with strangers. “Why do you keep the big ugly brutes, if it isn’t a rude question” inquired Biggles blandly. “You might call them my watchdogs. They discourage trespasser on my property”. Biggles gets back in the plane to take off and finds Bertie hiding in his seat. When he has taken off, Algy asks if that was a genuine forced landing or faked? Biggles confesses he was up to something. Algy says Lord Malboise was nice, but Biggles suspects his real reason was that he probably didn’t like them too near that building. Bertie explains that he was keeping his “mug out of sight” because “the good-looking chappie driving that Rover was the one who tried to bribe me in the garage at the Savoy”. Biggles says that makes Clarence a crook and “if his lordship knows what his brother is doing, and surely he must, that makes him a crook, too”. Biggles says that perhaps they should accept “his lordship’s kind invitation to sample his sherry”. “I’m beginning to get a feeling there’s more in Brindon Park than meets the eye”.