The Voice from the Void: The Great Wireless Mystery

“On the platform at Waterloo Station on a Sunday morning – the day when you also disappeared. She was with a gentleman whose description I have, and whom we must find. I have already a very reliable firm of private inquiry agents at work, and that much they have already discovered. Whether the pair took train from Waterloo is not known.” And taking a paper from a drawer which he unlocked he read a minute description of a middle-aged, clean-shaven, well-dressed man, to which Roddy listened.

“Ah!” he said at last. “I know of nobody who answers to that description.” And he spoke the truth.

The fact, however, that Elma’s father had engaged detectives was rather perturbing. They might discover the secret of his love for Elma! That secret both were determined, for the present, to conceal.

Half an hour later Roddy walked back along Lombard Street, that bustling thoroughfare of bankers and financiers, full of grave reflections. If he could only recollect what had happened during that period of half-oblivion, then he would be able to act with fearlessness and come to grips with his enemies.

He remembered that on the previous night he had learnt where Freda Crisp lived – a house called Willowden, on the high road beyond Welwyn. Therefore after a sandwich at the refreshment bar at King’s Cross station he took train, and half an hour later alighted at Welwyn station.

Directed by a butcher’s boy, he walked for about a mile along the broad high road until he came to the house – a large old-fashioned one standing back amid a clump of high fir trees, with a tennis lawn and large walled garden on the left. The green holland blinds were down, and apparently the place was temporarily closed, a fact which gave him courage to approach nearer.

As he did so the chords of his memory began to vibrate. He could remember at last! He recollected quite distinctly walking on the lawn. In a flash it all came back to him! There was a gate which led into a small rose garden. He looked for it. Yes! There it was! And the grey old sundial! He recollected the quaint inscription upon it: “I mark ye Time; saye Gossip dost thou so.” Yes, the weather-beaten old dial was there beside a lily pond with a pretty rock garden beyond.

He stood peering eagerly through a crack in the old moss-grown oak fence, his vista being limited. But it sufficed to recall to his be-dimmed memory some details, sharp and outstanding, of the interior of that old Georgian house, its plan and its early Victorian furnishings. In the days he had spent there he had wandered aimlessly in and out. He knew that the two French windows, which he could see, opening on to a veranda and giving out upon the leaf-strewn lawn, were those of the drawing-room. The old-fashioned furniture he remembered was covered with glazed chintz with a design of great red roses and green peacocks. In the centre was a large settee upon which the Woman of Evil had often sat beside him, holding his hand and talking to him in domineering tones, while her elderly male companion sat in a high-backed “grandfather” chair beside the fire, smoking and smiling.

Mostly, however, he had spent his time in an upstairs room which had once been a nursery, for it had iron bars at the window. His eyes sought that window – and he found it!

Ah! in that room he had spent many dreary hours; his mind filled with weird and horrible visions – shadowy pictures which seemed bent on driving him to insanity.

For fully a quarter of an hour he remained in the vicinity, his eyes strained on every side, and gradually recovering his normal memory.

When, however, he tried to recall that night when he had acted under the overbearing influence of the woman Crisp he, alas! failed – failed utterly. Perhaps if he could get sight of the interior of the room in which he was victimised he might remember, but strive how he would all he could recall was but misty and unreal.

At last he turned from the house, half-fearful lest his presence there might be known, yet gratified that the place was shut up.

Had the woman and her companion left? Had they taken fright and flown?

He walked back to the station, but ere he had arrived at King’s Cross he found that his recollection was becoming fainter, until it was just as hazy as before. Only when his eyes were fixed upon the scene of his mysterious bondage did his memory return to him.

Yet he had satisfactorily cleared up one important point. He had fixed the house to which he had been secretly conveyed. Had the girl Edna Manners been taken there also? Perhaps her body had afterwards been concealed. Recollection of his mysterious discovery caused him to shudder. The girl’s appeal to him to save her still sounded in his ears, while the vision of that pale, still countenance often rose before him.

Next day, and the next, he was busy purchasing the wireless set which he had promised to obtain for Mr Sandys – a seven-valve Marconi set with a “double note-magnifier,” a microphone relay and a loud-speaking telephone. This, with coils taking every wavelength from one hundred to twenty-five thousand metres, completed one of the best and most sensitive sets that had been invented.

Adjoining the morning-room in the east wing of Farncombe Towers was a small ante-room, and into this he proceeded to instal the apparatus, aided of course by Elma. Mr Sandys had gone to Paris to consult with his partner, therefore the young pair had the place to themselves.

The local builder at Roddy’s orders put up a mast upon the tower immediately above the room they had chosen, and the young man having constructed the double-line aerial a hundred feet long and put many insulators of both ebonite and porcelain at each end, the long twin wires were one morning hoisted to the pole, while the other end was secured in the top of a great Wellingtonia not far from the mansion. The lead-in cable, known to naval wireless men as the “cow-tail,” was brought on to a well-insulated brass rod which passed through the window-frame and so on to the instruments, which Roddy set up neatly in an American roll-top desk as being convenient to exclude the dust.

Making a wireless “earth” proved an amusing diversion to both. Elma, who had read a book about wireless, suggested soldering a wire to the water tap; but Roddy, who had bought his experience in wireless after many months and even years of experiment, replied:

“Yes. That’s all very well for an amateur ‘earth,’ but we’ve put up a professional set, and we must make a real ‘earth.’”

The real “earth” consisted, first, of digging three deep holes about four feet deep and three feet long under the aerial. This necessitated the use of a pickaxe borrowed from the head gardener, for they had to dig into chalk.

Elma proved herself an enthusiastic excavator and very handy with the shovel, and after a heavy afternoon’s work she wheeled a barrowful of coke from the palm-house furnace, and Roddy carefully placed a zinc plate in a perpendicular position into each hole and surrounded it with coke which, absorbing the moisture, would always keep the zinc damp, and hence make a good earth connexion. These three plates having been put in directly beneath the aerial wires, they were connected by soldered wires, and before darkness set in the earth-wire was brought in and connected up to the set.

Afterwards, in order to make certain of his “earth” – usually one of the most neglected portions of a wireless installation, by the way – he took a large mat of fine copper gauze which he had bought in London, and soldering a lead to it spread it across the grass, also beneath the aerial.

Elma watched it all in wonderment and in admiration of Roddy’s scientific knowledge. She had read the elementary book upon wireless, but her lover, discarding the directions there set down, had put in things which she did not understand.

“And now will it really work?” asked the girl, as together they stood in the little room where upon the oak writing-desk the various complicated-looking pieces of apparatus had been screwed down.

“Let’s try,” said Roddy, screwing two pairs of head-’phones upon two brass terminals on one of the units of the apparatus.

Elma took one pair of telephones, while Roddy placed the others over his ears. His deft fingers pulled over the aerial switch, whereupon the nine little tubular electric lights instantly glowed, each of them three inches long and about the size of a chemical test-tube. They gave quite a pretty effect.

“Thanks, Cox!” came a voice, loud and distinct. “I could not get you clearly until now. I understand that your position is about half-way across the Channel and that visibility is rather bad. Le Bourget reported when you left. Righto! Croydon, switching off!”

“Splendid!” Elma cried. “Just fancy, within a day you have fitted up wireless for us, so that we can actually hear telephony on the Paris airway!”

“That was my friend Luger talking to the Paris-London mail-plane. Probably we’ll have Tubby next.”

“Who’s Tubby?”

“Oh! The one-time boy scout who is an operator in the hut at Croydon aerodrome and who climbs the masts, fits the switch-board, and does all the odd jobs. Sometimes the jobs are very odd, for he makes the wheels go round when other people give it up. Listen again. The hour has just struck. Tubby may now come on duty.”

Again they placed the telephones over their ears, but beyond a few faint dots and dashes – “spark” signals from ships at sea and “harmonies” at that – there was nothing. The mysterious voice of Croydon was silent.

Suddenly they heard a kind of wind whistle in the telephones, and another voice, rather high-pitched, said:

“Hulloa! G.E.A.Y.! Hulloa, Cox! Croydon calling. Please give me your position. Croydon over.”

“That’s Tubby,” laughed Roddy. “I thought he’d come on duty for the last watch.”

“Marvellous!” declared the pretty girl, still listening intently.

Then she heard a faint voice reply:

“Hulloa, Croydon! G.E.A.Y. answering. I am just over Boulogne; visibility much better. Thanks, Tubby! Switching off.”

Roddy removed the telephones from his ears, and remarked:

“I hope your father will be interested.”

“He will, I’m certain. It’s topping,” the girl declared, “but it’s rather weird though.”

“Yes – to the uninitiated,” he replied. Then, glancing at his wrist-watch, he said: “It’s time that New Brunswick began to work with Carnarvon. Let us see if we can get the American station.”

He changed the small coils of wires for ones treble their size, and having adjusted them, they both listened again.

“There he is!” Roddy exclaimed. “Sending his testing ‘V’s’ in Morse. Do you hear them – three shorts and one long?”

In the ’phones the girl could hear them quite plainly, though the sending station was across the Atlantic.

Then the signals stopped. Instantly the great Marconi station gave the signal “go.” And Roddy, taking up a pencil, scribbled down the first message of the series, a commercial message addressed to a shipping firm in Liverpool from their New York agent concerning freights, followed, with scarce a pause, by a congratulatory message upon somebody’s marriage – two persons named Gladwyn – and then a short Press message recording what the President had said in Congress an hour before.

“They’ll keep on all night,” remarked Roddy, with a smile. “But so long as the set works, that’s all I care about. I only hope your father will be satisfied that I’ve tried to do my best.”

“Really the marvels of wireless are unending!” Elma declared, looking into her lover’s strong, manly face. “You said that the broadcast would come on at eight. Stay and have something to eat, and let us listen to it.”

“Ah! I’m afraid I’d – ”

“Afraid! Of course not!” she laughed merrily, and ringing the bell she told Hughes, who answered, that “Mr Homfray would stay to dinner.”

The latter proved a cosy tête-à-tête meal at which the old butler very discreetly left the young couple to themselves, and at eight they were back in the newly fitted wireless-room where, on taking up the telephones, they found that the concert broadcasted from London had already begun. A certain prima donna of world-wide fame was singing a selection from Il Trovatore, and into the room the singer’s voice came perfectly.

Roddy turned a switch, and instead of the music being received into the ’phones it came out through the horn of the “loud speaker,” and could be heard as though the singer was actually in the house and not forty-five miles away.

And they sat together for yet another hour enjoying the latest wonders of wireless.

Chapter Twelve

Rex Rutherford’s Prophecy

At the Rectory Roddy sat in his own wireless-room until far into the night, fitting a complete wireless receiving-set into a small cigar-box. The one he had fitted into a tin tobacco-box was efficient in a sense, but the detector being a crystal it was not sufficiently sensitive to suit him.

The one he was constructing was of his own design, with three valves – as the little wireless glow-lamps are called – the batteries and telephones being all contained in the box, which could easily be carried in the pocket together with a small coil of wire which could be strung up anywhere as an aerial, and as “earth” a lamp post, a pillar-box, or running water could be used.

It was nearly three o’clock in the morning before he had finished assembling it, and prior to fixing it in the box he submitted it to a test. Opening the window of his wireless-room he threw the end of the coil of wire outside. Then going out into the moonlight, he took the ball insulator at the end of the wire and fixed it upon a nail he had driven in the wall of the gardener’s potting-shed some time before.

Then, having stretched the wire taut to the house, he went back and attached it to one of the terminal screws of the little set upon which he had been working for many days. The earth-wire of his experimental set he joined up, and then putting on the ’phones listened intently.

Not a tick!

He slowly turned the ebonite knob of the condenser, but to no avail. Raising the wavelength brought no better result. Was it yet another failure? As an experimenter in radio he was used to failures, so it never disheartened him. Failure in prospecting was the same as failure in wireless. He received each rebuff complacently, but with that air of dogged perseverance of which success is ever born.

“Strange!” he remarked aloud. “It certainly should give signals.”

Then he examined the underside of the sheet of ebonite on which the various units were mounted, valves, condensers, etc, when at last he discovered a faulty connexion on the grid-leak. The latter will puzzle the uninitiated, but suffice it to say that so delicate is wireless receiving that over a line drawn by a lead pencil across paper or ebonite with a two-inch scratch in it filled with pencil dust the electric waves will travel. The connexion was not complete at one end. He tightened the little terminal, and suddenly came the expected high-pitched dots and dashes in the Morse code.

“Ah! Stonehaven!” he remarked. Then, by turning the knob of the condenser, a sharp rippling sound was brought in – the automatic transmission from Cologne to Aldershot at seventy words a minute.

Backwards and forwards he turned the condenser, and with a second knob altered the wavelength of his reception, first tuning in ships in the Channel signalling to their controlling station at Niton, in the Isle of Wight, or the North Foreland; then Leafield, in Oxfordshire, could be heard transmitting to Cairo, while Madrid was calling Ongar, and upon the highest wavelength the powerful Marconi station at Carnarvon was sending out a continuous stream of messages across the Atlantic.

Suddenly, as he reduced his wavelength below six hundred metres, he heard a man’s deep voice call:

“Hulloa, 3.V.N. Hulloa! This is 3.A.Z. answering. What I said was the truth. You will understand. Tell me that you do. It is important and very urgent. 3.A.Z. changing over.”

Who 3.A.Z. was, or who 3.V.N., Roddy did not at the moment know without looking up the call-letters in his list of experimental stations. The voice was, however, very strong, and evidently high power was being used.

He listened, and presently he heard a voice much fainter and evidently at a considerable distance, reply:

“Hulloa, 3.A.Z. This is 3.V.N. answering. No, I could not get you quite clearly then. Remember, I am at Nice. Kindly now repeat your message on a thousand metres. 3.V.N. over.”

Quickly Roddy increased his wavelength to a thousand metres, which he swiftly tested with his wave-metre, a box-like apparatus with buzzer and little electric bulb. Suddenly through the ether came the words even more clearly than before:

“Hulloa, 3.V.N. at Nice! Hulloa! This is 3.A.Z. repeating. I will repeat slowly. Please listen! 3.A.Z. repeating a message. Andrew Barclay leaves London to-morrow for Marseilles, where he will meet Mohamed Ben Azuz at the Hôtel Louvre et Paix. Will you go to Marseilles? Please reply. 3.A.Z. over.”

Roddy held his breath. Who could possibly be warning somebody in the south of France of his friend Barclay’s departure from Victoria to interview the Moorish Minister of the Interior regarding the concession?

Again he listened, and yet again came the far-off voice, faint, though yet distinct:

“3.V.N. calling 3.A.Z.! Thanks, I understand. Yes. I will go by next train to Marseilles. Is Freda coming? 3.V.N. over.”

“Yes. Freda will come if you wish it,” replied the loud, hard voice. “3.A.Z. calling 3.V.N. Over.”

“Hulloa, 3.A.Z. From 3.V.N. Thanks. Shall expect Freda, but not by same train. Tell Jimmie to be on the alert. I’ll explain to Freda when I see her. Good-night, old man. Good-bye. 3.V.N. closing down.”

Quickly Roddy searched his list of amateur call-signs, but he could not find either 3.A.Z. or 3.V.N. They were evidently false signs used by pre-arrangement, but by persons who, strangely enough, knew of his friend Barclay’s journey on the morrow!

And Freda? Could it be Freda Crisp who had been indicated? Why was she going south also – but not by the same train?

After an hour’s sleep young Homfray, much mystified, rose, dressed, and taking out his motorcycle, started up the long high road to London.

On the platform at Victoria as early as half-past eight o’clock he awaited his friend Barclay. Presently he came, a ruddy, round-faced, rather short little man of fifty, who was a thoroughgoing cosmopolitan and who had dabbled in concessions in all parts of the world.

“Hulloa, Homfray!” he exclaimed, looking at the muddy condition of his friend’s motor clothes. “I didn’t expect you to come to see me off.”

“No,” replied the young man rather hesitatingly, “but the fact is I have come here to warn you.”

“Warn me! Of what?” asked his friend in surprise.

Then Roddy explained, and repeated what the mysterious voice from the void had said.

“Both speaker and listener were disguised under false call-signs,” he went on. “Hence it is highly suspicious, and I felt it my duty to tell you.”

Andrew Barclay was puzzled. The porter was placing his bags in a first-class compartment of the boat train, which was crowded with people going holiday-making abroad. Loud-voiced society women commanded porters, and elderly men stalked along to the carriages following their piles of baggage. The eight-forty Paris service is usually crowded in summer and winter, for one gets to Paris by five, in time for a leisurely dinner and the series of trains which leave the Gare de Lyon in the region of nine o’clock.

“Just repeat all you said, Roddy, will you?” asked the man in the heavy travelling coat.

The young fellow did so.

“Freda? That’s a rather unusual name. Has it anything to do with that woman Freda Crisp you told me about? What do you think?”

“I believe it has.”

Barclay was aware of all the strange experiences of the shrewd young mining engineer. Only three days after his return to Little Farncombe he had gone down to the quiet old country rectory and listened to his friend’s story.

In this concession to work the ancient mines in the Wad Sus he was equally interested with his young friend in whom he believed so implicitly, knowing how enthusiastic and therefore successful he had been in his prospecting expeditions up the Amazon.

The big portable luggage-vans – those secured by wire hawsers which are slung on to the mail-boat and re-slung on to the Paris express – had been locked and sealed with lead, as they always are. The head guard’s whistle blew, and Barclay was about to enter the train, when Roddy said:

“Do take care! There’s more in this than either of us suspect. That woman Crisp! Beware of her. You will see her in due course at your hotel. Be careful. Good-bye – and good luck!”

The train moved out around the bend. The young fellow in his wet, muddy overalls stood for a moment gazing at the rear van. Should he watch for the departure of the woman? No. She might see him. Better that he should remain in apparent ignorance. So he went out, remounted his cycle, and headed away back over Putney Bridge and through crooked Kingston, Cobham, and down the steep hill in Guildford towards home.

Freda! That name was burned into his brain like the brand of a red-hot iron. Freda – the woman who had held him beneath her strange, inexplicable spell during his bondage at the remote old country house near Welwyn.

But why? Why should his father have warned him against her? His father, a most honest, upright, pious man to whom he had always looked for leadership – the road-builder to the perfect life, as he had always regarded him. No man in the world is perfect, but Norton Homfray had, to say the least, tried to live up to the standard laid down by the Holy Writ.

Had he had faults in his past life, his son wondered? Every man has faults. Were those faults being concealed by his father – the “pater” upon whom he doted and to whom when away he wrote so regularly, with all his most intimate news, though mails might leave very intermittently, as they do from the back of beyond, where prospectors carry on their work with hammer and microscope.

Then, as he rode along in the grey, damp winter morning, he reflected.

The whole situation was most puzzling. He loved Elma with a fierce all-consuming affection. She was his only beacon in his eager, strenuous life.

A week went by. He anxiously awaited news from Andrew Barclay, but the latter sent no word. He was, without doubt, negotiating with the Moorish Minister of the Interior, who was at that moment visiting France, and who was his personal friend.

But Roddy could not rid himself of the recollection of that strange conversation by radio-telephone – the request that Freda should go south. He had taken another journey out to Welwyn in order to ascertain if the woman was still at Willowden, but had found the house still closed and apparently without a caretaker. Had he been able to get a view of the back of the premises he would, no doubt, have noticed the well-constructed wireless aerial, but it was completely hidden from the road, and as during his enforced sojourn in the place he had never seen it, he remained in ignorance of its existence.

At Farncombe Towers Mr Sandys, when he returned home, had expressed himself highly delighted with the wireless set which the rector’s son had installed, and on two successive evenings sat with Elma intensely interested in listening to broadcasted concerts and news.

Three nights later Elma and her father, having been to the first night of a new revue, had had supper at the Savoy, and passing into the lounge, sat down to their coffee, when an elderly, clean-shaven, rather tall man, accompanied by a well-dressed, shorter, but good-looking companion, both in well-cut evening clothes, suddenly halted.

“Hulloa, Harrison!” exclaimed the grey-bearded financier to the man who bowed before Elma and greeted her.

“Not often we see you here, Mr Sandys!” replied the man, evidently surprised. Then he begged leave to introduce his companion, Mr Rex Rutherford.

Elma smiled as the stranger expressed delight at meeting her father and herself.

“Your name is very well known to me, as to everybody, Mr Sandys,” said the dark-eyed man pleasantly, as they both took chairs which the financier offered them, at the same time ordering extra coffee. “Though I’m an American, I live mostly in Paris, and I met your partner, Sir Charles, there quite recently.”