Текст книги "A Rough Shoot "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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A ROUGH SHOOT

BY GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

A ROUGH SHOOT

IT ALL BEGAN on an autumn evening so silent and peaceful that no one who had the luck to be out of doors, with copse and downland stretching away from him till the folds of England vanished into a mist of gray and green, could have a thought of human violence. We had had two weeks of storm, and then came this Tuesday, the eighteenth of October, which belonged to late summer. All the life of grass and hedgerow was too busy satisfying hunger to be on guard. I didn’t fire a shot the whole afternoon–not for lack of opportunity but because I wanted to see what game I had on the shoot and what were its movements if undisturbed.

I had rented very cheaply the rough shooting over 450 acres of a remote Dorset farm. The sport wouldn’t have appealed to a man who liked driven pheasants or to a syndicate who expected the mixed bag to pay for their week end. You had to work for your game. But on a favorable afternoon, if your liver and eyes were in good order–for it was speed that counted–you might come home with a brace of partridges, a hare and of course all the rabbits you cared to kill. I shot purely for the pot, and anything I didn’t want I left for another day. I did not even use a dog. That will horrify the purist, but I would assure him that I seldom blazed away at the improbable, and that a bird which I couldn’t retrieve myself was rare. Dull? Yes, if your fun is to fire off a lot of cartridges. No, if you shoot only for what the larder will hold. Of course with a dog I would have put up more pheasants from the hedgerows, but I got enough.

I only went up to the shoot on Saturday afternoons. Everybody knew that. Blossom, who was the tenant farmer, would have sworn to it, and I dare say that later he did. This Tuesday evening visit was due to accidents: that I had a slack afternoon at the office; that my gun happened to be at the gunsmith’s, waiting to be picked up; and that the weather promised a glorious hour before the sudden autumn twilight.

I didn’t use my gun and I moved around the shoot silently and for the most part under cover. I wanted to know the permanent population and its taste in feeding grounds. A little before sunset I established myself in the thick boundary hedge, whence I had an excellent view of four other hedges and a long, warm slope of down.

Blossom’s farm was long and narrow, running roughly north and south. Down the center was the level, bare watershed. The western slope was sharp, dropping to water meadows and a busy road; its short turf was dotted with clumps of thorn, gorse and bramble so thick that even hounds were baffled, and the foxes and rabbits kept up the balance of nature undisturbed. The eastern slope was slight, and fell away gradually to the boundary hedge, which, in places, was a jungle twenty feet thick. To the south were a hilltop barn and outhouses, and beyond them a few primmer, kinder meadows.

I stayed on in the hedge till dusk, watching the movements of a flock of pigeons. There wasn’t a soul about. Plowing was over, and there would be little work on the slopes until the kale came to be cut for winter feed and the sheep were folded on the roots. That autumn the whole work of the farm was going on in the water meadows and in the fields beyond the barn. .

At right angles to the boundary hedge was another, which had thrown out great domes and bastions of bramble. I was astonished to see, appearing from the curve of one of these bushes, the seat of a generous pair of trousers. The man was apparently pegging something down just inside the hedge, and working backwards towards me.

He half turned, and laid on the turf some sort of spike with a broad head.

Of course my mind leaped at once to rabbit traps; but when at last the man stood up, I saw that he wasn’t a farm laborer, and wasn’t dressed like a person who would be interested in rabbits. The expanse of cloth which he had persistently presented to me was town trouser.

If he were poaching, I thought, he ought to have either a dog or a companion. I looked more carefully into the dusk, and sure enough I found the companion. He was standing quite motionless on the top of the bank, under and against an ivy-covered oak, whence he could see for quarter of a mile on all sides of him. His disciplined stillness had its reward. A cock pheasant flew up to roost in the opposite tree. The trapper in the hedge saw it, drew an air pistol from his pocket and shot it neatly down.

This made me unduly angry. I wouldn’t have minded a bit if they had been local villagers out for next Sunday’s dinner, but from their clothes I knew they were not. Somehow I got it into my head that they were commercial poachers, come all the way from London or Bournemouth to supply the black market. I didn’t stop to think that, if they were, they wouldn’t be working hedgerows but would clear out some big estate where one overworked gamekeeper still managed to keep up a stock of game.

The watcher on the bank looked down at the ping of the shot. He hardly spoke above a whisper, but gave the impression of being almost hysterical with petty annoyance. The man with the air pistol said something obviously rude, picked up the pheasant and returned to his job. He continued to work with his back to me, now well outside the bush but still presenting his broad and perfect target.

The temptation was too great. I didn’t want the bother of handing them over to the law–supposing I could catch them–but I did want to teach them a lesson. The range was about eighty yards, far enough, I thought, to hurt but to do no damage that a probe and a little disinfectant couldn’t cure. I let him have a charge of No. 5 shot in the seat of the pants.

I talk lightly of this shocking brutality, but my conscience was and is appalled by the result. He straightened himself with a jerk, completely off balance as if he were diving from a springboard, and crashed heavily to the ground. He kicked twice and lay still, his face and shoulders on the thorns of the blackberry bush. His companion jumped down the far side of the bank and bolted across country with no thought but for his own safety. I didn’t call to him to stop. I was paralyzed by the shock of what I had done. And there was little doubt of it. No man who had life in him would lie in that position.

I don’t know how long I stared at him, perhaps ten seconds, perhaps twenty–a stillness which was partly horror and partly habit, acquired in war, of not giving my cover away. Then I dashed out of the hedge, taking a smack over the eye from an ash sapling, and ran to him.

I didn’t move the body at first, fearing, impossible though it seemed, that I had damaged the spine. I raised his coat, cut the waistband of his trousers and tore them down the seam. The pattern of the shot was regular and very shallow and exactly where it ought to have been. If a beater, in the days of big shoots, had suffered such an accident, he would have felt that a pint of beer and a brace of pheasants amply repaid the inconvenience.

Then I turned him over, and understood. He was like the men in the Bible. He had fallen on his sword. One of the broad-headed spikes had been lying on the ground, point uppermost like a giant thumbtack, and the round, shiny metal base was now pinned, a crimson-bordered decoration, to his left breast.

Instinctively I took hold to pull it out. Then a sort of panic reason took command and I let go, and wiped my fingerprints off it with his coat. Then I thought: Oh Lord, they’ll spot that somebody has wiped it! And after that my imagination took me through an entire dialogue with the police.

That damned mark across my eye. Signs of a struggle. You shot at him. Then he struck you. You lost your temper and stabbed him. How did the dead man’s clothes come to be torn? A wound of the spine, you thought! Ah, trying to make it manslaughter instead of murder, are you? Have you a respect for human life, Mr. Taine? Yes, profound. In the war you won a D.C.M. as a corporal, I believe? Yes, I did. How many men did you kill on that occasion? Damn you, do you suppose I counted them? You had further decorations after you were commissioned? Yes, I did. You seem to have enjoyed this single-handed stuff? I hated it, but my chaps were about all in. Come, come, Mr. Taine, now what really happened after the man struck you?

Well, no doubt I exaggerated. Perhaps some proofs could have been discovered by examination of the ground that my story was true. Perhaps I should never have been in the dock on a charge of murder. But most certainly I was guilty of manslaughter.

Now, if I am to explain properly the panic I was in, and what I did, I must tell a little about myself. My name is Roger Taine. I am thirty-four, with a family and no capital. I have a good job as Dorset agent for a big quarry combine, producing cement, roofing tiles, special bricks, stone for building and gravel for roads, and all sorts of by-products that interest an up-to-date architect or county surveyor. What with commission and salary, I’ve no complaints, but my family, of course, has no security beyond my own earning power.

So, as I stood over the corpse and watched the dark shadow–in a dusk already too deep to distinguish color-spreading over his clothes from beneath the head of that gigantic thumbtack, I passed from the police interrogation to what the judge would say. Shooting a harmless poacher as if I were some callous county magnate a hundred and fifty years ago. At the best criminally negligent. At the worst a savage sadist from whom society must be protected. Make an example of him. Five years.

I couldn’t expect to get less, and I deserved it. But when you have a family it’s not so much the sentence which counts as the result of it–the complete, irrevocable breaking of the continuity between past and future. I’m not one of your go-getters. A small post as a clerk with some charitable firm would be all I could hope for, and there, for the rest of my life, I should remain.

After hearing the judge’s remarks, I had no doubt at all that there weren’t going to be any judge’s remarks if I could help it. There was no one about. The dead man’s companion had cleared out without ever seeing me or even knowing where the shot came from. I caught a glimpse of him bolting over the skyline towards a lonely road which ran across the downs some five hundred yards from Blossom’s boundary, and then I saw the lights of a car gather speed and go tearing northwards.

I determined to get rid of the body where it wouldn’t be found. It was, I admit, the act of a bad citizen, and, to my present way of thinking, a great deal worse than taking a careful shot–for I was careful–at that broad and unexpectedly vulnerable target from a perfectly safe range.

The disposal of bodies, as anyone knows who reads the Sunday papers, is not easy: sooner or later they turn up. I could not hope to find a permanent solution then and there. He was too heavy to carry far, and I had no spade. The most I could do was to hide him, so that the man who ran away would assume, if he returned, that his companion had recovered and left. There was hardly any blood on the ground. No doubt police would have detected it, but it wasn’t visible to a casual eye.

I strapped my game bag over the wound and got him on my back. I was about to set off when it occurred to me that the traps were still in position. Was I to leave them or remove them? Either act might be evidence against me if there were ever any inquiry. I put him down, and hunted about in the last of the light. There were no traps at all. I found a spirit level, a foot rule and three more of those murderous broad-headed spikes.

The sweat poured down my ribs. Had I shot at some harmless Post Office surveyor? But that didn’t make sense. The wildest conjectures went through my head. Commando training? Broadcasting engineers? Some kind of official experiment? I had hoped, with an irresponsible, cowardly optimism that I suspect is shared by every criminal, that there would only be the most perfunctory search for my supposed poacher, or none at all; his accomplice hadn’t looked a man to get himself into the slightest trouble that could be avoided. But now it was absolutely certain that it would be some employer’s duty to make the most exhaustive inquiries.

It is curious how every animal, even a quarry agent, is a creature of habit. In the midst of this blinding mess, which should have excluded all other worries, I found time to be upset at the thought of returning home too late. My wife knew that I was up at the shoot, for I had telephoned from Dorchester after leaving my office. She would be anxious when I didn’t return at nightfall, and the children would catch her mood and refuse to go to sleep. I hated the thought of inventing some long and complicated lie. I never do lie to her. There’s no reason for it.

That made me impatient, and over-anxious for a quick and temporary solution. I should have bicycled home, got out my car and taken the body a hundred miles away from my shoot. The following night when, for all I knew, the place might be teeming with policemen, it would be impossible. The bicycle I must explain. Partly to save petrol, but more to keep fit, I always bicycled to and from the office on days when I knew I wasn’t going to need the car. And so that evening the bicycle was all I had.

I carried my burden half a mile along the top of the down, and dropped it, together with all its tools, into a rabbit warren. This was a hollow which must once have been a dew pond or a flint pit. The steep sides were honeycombed with rabbit holes, so large and so close together that once when I climbed down to pick up a shot rabbit the earth gave way and I sank over the knees. It was an unsavory spot, with the carcasses of half a dozen sheep at the bottom, which had died of disease and been thrown there to rot.

I stamped on the tunnels and galleries until the soil caved in. Then I laid the corpse in this irregular trench and lightly covered it. In the pockets and on the clothes there was nothing to prove identity–or at any rate nothing that I could see by the light of matches. I was careful to leave no smooth slope of new earth, and reckoned that there would be nothing suspicious to a casual eye. The only risk I ran was from a dog, which could track me across the down if he were put onto my scent in time.

I picked up my gun and returned to my bicycle, which was leaning against a haystack just off the upper road. On the way home I stopped at the edge of a fast stream and let the water run over my game bag and my coat to dissolve the blood. I wished to heaven that I had had more experience of police methods than odd bits and pieces gathered from newspaper reports and detective stories. War experience –well, there was that, and I suppose in a way it was useful. At any rate I had carried a dead man before though I didn’t know he was dead till we arrived. War, too, had convinced me that a remarkable deal of crime is never discovered at all.

It was nine o’clock when I got home, and, as I expected, Cecily was very worried. She had visions of a shooting accident; they were not unreasonable, and, if you think of it, they were correct. My lateness was inexplicable. If I had stopped at a pub or to see a friend on my way home, I should have telephoned. She knew, too, that I wouldn’t willingly disappoint our two boys, who had been promised a long story before bedtime.

I told her that I had stayed very late looking for a dead bird, and that on the way back a tire had been punctured (which was true, for I had driven a pin into it just before reaching home), so I had had to walk. She gave me a silent, doubtful look once or twice in the evening, which meant that she knew there was trouble on my mind, and that she too proud to ask for it. I pretended to be sulky just because I hadn’t shot anything.

The next day I awoke–if it can be called waking after such a night–with an atrocious, evil conscience. To prepare the way for my absence, I told Cecily that I intended to do a round of customers and prospects, and that, as I was going to be in the north of the county, I should call on my opposite number in Salisbury and stay the night. This was a perfectly normal routine; nevertheless she asked me diffidently to call her from Salisbury just to say that I was all right. I tied my bicycle to the roof of the car–on the grounds that I couldn’t be bothered to mend the puncture myself–and surreptitiously threw a spade into the back.

I told my clerk–there were only the two of us in the office–that I was going to do a round of visits, and that I shouldn’t come back. Then I drove twice round the shoot through all the lanes and roads that were near to it. There was no sign at all of anything wrong, no cars of police or strangers parked by the roadside or on the cart tracks.

I dropped in on old Blossom, the farmer from whom I rented the shooting. We had a mug of cider together–he was one of the few men left in the county who still made his own–and talked of local affairs. He evidently hadn’t been disturbed by police or anyone else. He mightn’t have told me, of course, if he had; but I knew him well enough to recognize his manner when he was being heavily discreet. You could always hear him turning on the caution, and forcing his geniality a bit.

As I drove out of Blossom’s gate and over the stream, I passed a man standing on the roadside near the bridge. He looked brisk and important, like a fussy foreman on a job he didn’t understand. In the ordinary way he would never have made me suspicious. Blossom’s farm, the tall elms and the clear chalk stream, made a pretty, if somewhat obvious picture that always attracted the holiday-making townsman. It was a bit late, however, for holidays, and it wasn’t a week end; and then the man was dressed as some minor, pestiferous government employee, yet had no vehicle in sight. I drove very slowly away, and watched him in the mirror. He was looking after my car; he wrote something, presumably its number, in a notebook.

I pulled up a little farther on, and climbed a slope to observe him. He seemed to be making a sort of census of traffic. The vet and the baker both stopped at the farm, and, as if glad of the opportunity, he asked them questions. His self-satisfaction was obvious, even from a distance.

I couldn’t believe this little man was a policeman, or that his questions were police routine. If anyone had approached the Dorset Constabulary with some story, necessarily vague, of a man shot on Blossom’s land, their very first move would be to interview Blossom and inspect the ground. They wouldn’t put a plain-clothes detective on the job before they knew whether there was a word of truth in the yarn.

Somebody else, however, seemed to have acted quickly. My thoughts returned to the imagined gang of game and poultry thieves. Perhaps they had some ingenious method of attracting things wild and edible by light or by some device that needed careful leveling. In any case this was a warning that some sort of investigation was going on. My simple plan had to be scrapped. I couldn’t risk leaving my car anywhere near the shoot, under possible observation, while I dug up the body and carried it back.

I drove on and lunched very late at a remote pub overlooking the Blackmoor Vale, where the landlord, who was a friend of mine, always had something solid to eat which food controllers had never heard of. On this occasion it was a badger ham, and very good it was. I was amazed at my appetite, and ashamed–but then I realized that my mind, all unknown to me, had been making deductions. Somebody was as yet unwilling to call in the police; and that could only mean that my shot was–well, not justified from any legal or moral point of view, but at least the sort of accident that did occur in the world to which the dead man had belonged. The instancy of his companion’s escape bore it out. Why run, unless he had a very guilty conscience or had been prepared to be shot at? Any normal citizen, however timid, would have protested then and there (though keeping, perhaps, carefully under cover) and would have gone to the police that very night.

So my conscience was easier, and my appetite made me realize it. I wasn’t quite in the position of a drunken driver who kills a man on the road and hides the body. I was more like the householder who shoots at a burglar and accidentally kills him. The law would take a serious view of such a crime, but the householder himself would not; and, if he could easily get rid of the body, he might be fool enough, as I was, to try.

I was strongly tempted to leave well enough alone; but then I should be at the mercy of the merest accident all through the winter–Blossom’s inquisitive sheepdogs, the rain or the rabbits themselves. No, the body couldn’t be left where it was. On the other hand it could no longer be removed by road. The only solution was to find a better hiding place on the shoot itself.

That wasn’t going to be easy. Hedges and coverts were thick with all the dying vegetation of summer, and I couldn’t dig in such stuff–apart from the physical difficulty of it–without leaving a patch of beaten ground which would be conspicuous to any determined searcher. Digging in the open and leveling off so that nothing suspicious remained was, at any rate at night, quite impossible. At last, in my after-lunch meditation, it occurred to me that I needn’t do either.

In the northeast corner of the shoot, at the top of the boundary hedge, was a tumble-down piece of dry stone walling which had once surrounded a barn or cottage, and now contained only a clump of beeches and a jungle of brambles. On the south side, just off Blossom’s land, was a field which had been freshly plowed and harrowed. I intended to pull down a short stretch of wall, dig a shallow hole and replace the stones when I had finished. The earth could be scattered on the new-turned earth of the field, and raked over with a branch. The nettles and bramble on the inner side of the wall would be undisturbed, and, if the job were neatly done, the two persons most concerned could rest in peace.

In the afternoon I drove back along the upper road and still saw nothing to disquiet me. I stopped for an instant to hide the spade in a ditch where I could pick it up later. When I reached Dorchester I put my car in the public car park and collected my bicycle at the little shop which had mended the puncture. I kept to the back streets, for I didn’t want to run into Cecily, who might be in town, or any of my friends.

After dusk I approached the shoot, very cautiously and without lights, along the upper road. I was prepared to give up the whole plan if I passed a single stranger, but I didn’t. For three miles, without either village or cottage, this narrow, well-metaled byroad switchbacked up and down across the high ground. There were several ways of scrambling across country from the road to Blossom’s land, but only one regular track–if you can call a couple of ruts in the grass a track.

I carefully reconnoitered the point where the track met the road. The man who ran away had taken this route the previous night. By bending close to the ground I could just make out the print of tires in the mud where his car had been parked. Then I rode on up the road, collected the spade, hid my bicycle and worked my way silently across the fields to the clump of beeches and the wall. There I was fairly close to the pit, but a good half mile from the corner of the hedge where the accident had happened.

It was a gusty night, with thin clouds whose lower edge occasionally touched the top of the downs and enveloped them in mist. The trees within the wall creaked and whispered, and the thorn and holly and elder of the great hedge rattled their branches and dying leaves. There was enough noise to cover any that I might make myself. Even so, before I started to remove the stones I sat still and watched and listened. The clouds were often tenuous enough to show the shape of a half-moon, and then I could see a hundred yards into the milky and uneasy world that surrounded me.

One by one I removed the flat stones of the wall, placing them on the bare earth of the field so that I would know in what order they went back. I hadn’t, of course, taken on the impossible task of replacing a neat wall in position. I wanted only to leave the tumble of stones, the wall-shaped object, looking much as it had before. While I worked I had my back towards the length of the boundary hedge, and I can’t say I liked it. With my back unguarded, with such a beastly task in front of me, and in not too deep a darkness, across which flitted the wisps and wraiths of cloud, I had to keep a tight hold on imagination.

I kept too tight a hold. Any balance was impossible.

Either I had to investigate every cracking branch, every inexplicable sound, or none at all. And so it was that I didn’t pay attention until the final rush of feet.

I ascribe my safety to sheer animal panic, for I am no athlete. All my suppressed fears exploded instantaneously and I jumped sideways and off, like a hare out of her form. As my pursuers stumbled over the stones, I increased a lead of five yards to twenty. I led them towards the road and then dived–literally dived, headfirst–over a gap in the hedge which I knew was closed by five strands of barbed wire. They crashed into it as I picked myself up, and gave tongue loudly in oaths that certainly weren’t those of local men. There were two of them. One had a cultured accent, and a loud and hearty voice. The other was a foreigner. Their speed and energy made me certain that neither was the man I had seen at Blossom’s gate. Dense cloud was moving over the ground, and in that foggy darkness I could get no impression at all of height or build. It was a comforting thought that to them too I must have been nothing but a piece of night which moved.

By the time they got clear of the wire and were able to listen to anything but themselves, I was safe. I dropped to the ground and waited. One of them produced a torch that he hadn’t had time to use before, and flashed it halfheartedly around. I noticed that he held it away from him at the full stretch of his arm. It was obvious that he thought I might fire at the light. This was a cheering reminder that I was not dealing with police, and that my pursuers, whoever they were, expected a more formidable enemy than an innocent and hitherto respectable salesman.

They gave up the search for me and returned to the wall. There of course they found my spade and walked off with it. That was a disaster. There would be some wonderful sets of my fingerprints on that spade. The Englishman said to the other:

“Hold it by the blade, man!”

So that was that, and the end of me if ever they chose to go to the police. I could never produce any convincing story to explain what I was doing with a spade in that corner of the shoot.

They walked away diagonally across the fields, aiming– I had to gamble on it–for the cart track. As soon as I was sure, I ran straight to my bicycle, tore silently up the road and reached the junction a little before them. They had no waiting car. They turned left and walked along the stretch of road I had just covered, one of them carrying the spade over his shoulder and still holding it by the blade. I followed, trailing them by the sound of their footsteps.

When they got over the brow of the hill I decided to take a chance. The road was good and my cycle well oiled. It made no more noise than dead leaves blowing over the tarmac. They were talking together as I swept down behind them, and when they heard me it was too late. I passed them at about fifteen miles an hour, swerved, grabbed at the spade and wobbled twice across the road– but I had it, and the torch was flashed too late. I heard them begin to run, and I put on speed.

Further on I came to a motorcycle and sidecar, parked just off the road without lights. I don’t suppose anyone else would have noticed it, but I was looking for their transport, and I knew all the gates and gaps where it could be. I had about a couple of minutes to deal with it. I caught carburetor and petrol pipe a devastating swipe with the spade f wrenched off the clutch cable, and then saw a handy billet of wood with which I wrecked the spokes of the back wheel. I lost my temper with that motorcycle, and I left it looking as if I had. Then I rode peacefully back to Dorchester, recovered my car, and was home before midnight with a story that I hadn’t had to stay at Salisbury after all.

It is now time to say something of my silent Cecily. She seldom says what she thinks. On the other hand, unless she is talking to fools who expect it of her, she never says what she doesn’t think. This apparent quiescence–a reluctance, one might call it, to disturb the status quo–makes her very easy to live with; too easy, perhaps, for I am inclined to accept her longer silences without inquiring into the cause as closely as I ought.

Such masculine laziness was now useful. I could pretend I didn’t notice her mood. She, on her part, was much too proud to ask me the reason for my odd behavior two nights running. I don’t want to give the impression that I had to explain all my movements to her. Of course I didn’t. I was a hard-working quarry agent, frequently on the road at short notice. No, I mean that ours was as good a marriage as you could find. If I was anxious or excited, she always knew it; if it was she who went through some silent crisis, I usually knew it. But we were both quite capable of feigning to see nothing wrong until the cloud over the other, whatever it was, had passed.

This peace which she created in our home helped me through the next forty-eight hours. When Cecily found a report in Thursday’s evening paper of an abandoned motorcycle on the upper road, which had had its number plates removed and seemed to have been in a smash, I was able to grunt and answer, with complete lack of interest, that I suppose it was stolen. I wanted, of course, day and night, to go up to the shoot and see that the rabbits in their pit were undisturbed, but somehow I managed to control myself until the week end.