Faked Passports by Dennis Wheatley Read Free Book Online Page A

adventures in making his secret night-landings in war-time Germany would have thrilled most people but he felt that they were mere child’s-play compared with Gregory’s impersonation of a Gestapo Chief and extraordinary series of escapes; besides which, he was a modest person so he said little of them. Perhaps, however, that was partly because his thoughts were centred about a girl, one Angela Fordyce, to whom he had been engaged to be married before the war.
    From his description of her it appeared that Angela was the world’s prize wonder, but Gregory wrote that down by about one hundred per cent. Privately he decided that she was probably quite a pleasant-looking brunette with reasonably good blue eyes and all the nice, clean, healthy instincts that an English girl should have, without any particular brain or wit; and so, admirably suited as a wife to the tall, grey-eyed, fair-haired young man who sat precariously perched upon the branch next to him.
    It seemed, however, that Freddie Charlton had bungled the affair badly. Unlike many men of his kind he had not considered the war a good excuse for rushing into marriage. On the contrary; he maintained that it was damnably unfair to any girl to marry her, and probably land her with a baby, if there were areasonably good prospect of being killed oneself within the year; particularly when the girl had been brought up expensively and one had no private money of one’s own and so could leave her only the pension of a Flight-Lieutenant. In consequence, knowing that she would not agree with him he had taken the quixotic step of writing to her on the outbreak of the war to break off his engagement, without giving any reason.
    Not unnaturally, in Gregory’s view, Angela had been annoyed and had demanded an explanation, upon which Freddie had made bad worse by writing to say that he had come to the conclusion that they were not suited to each other. On learning of this his best friend, one Bill Burton, had persuaded him that he had acted like a fool and had been extremely unfair both to the girl and to himself. Burton had then gone to see Angela in the hope of straightening the wretched muddle out, only to find that she had left England the day before and that it was therefore impossible for him to execute his pacific mission.
    As Angela’s father was in the Consular Service his being posted, without warning, to Amsterdam, and her sudden departure with him overseas, was not particularly surprising, but it had had the effect of erecting a new barrier; and, Burton’s mission having been sabotaged by fate, Freddie had felt that having made his bed he had better lie on it, so had refrained from writing to her. But he was still sick with the pain he had inflicted on himself and bitterly regretted that he had not written, especially now that it looked likely that he would be interned in Germany for the rest of the war and therefore debarred from any possibility of running into Angela again if she came on a visit to London, when they might perhaps have had an explanation leading to a renewal of their happiness.
    Being an eminently practical person, and no mean psychologist, Gregory forbore from voicing the obvious, meaningless platitudes and, instead, suggested that if only they could succeed in escaping over the frontier into Holland Freddie might see his Angela much sooner than if he had remained in London.
    This cheered the airman up considerably and, as it was intended to do gave him an additional incentive to use every ounce of his resolution in avoiding capture. He remained unaware that, the Dutch frontier being many hundreds of miles distant, Gregory did not mean to try to get out of Germany that way and, in fact, had no intention whatever of attempting to leave Germany at all until he had found Erika von Epp and could take her with him.
    They stuck it out up in the tree as long as they could bear the discomfort but by early afternoon their posteriors were