Текст книги "A Rough Shoot "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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On Saturday I took a full day off, and went over the ground with a determined unconcern calculated to deceive any watcher. The knowledge that I might be in the field of somebody’s glasses made me concentrate very nervously on my shooting–with the odd result that I couldn’t miss.

I was careful not to go straight to the pit. When at last I did go there, in the normal course of walking the length of the down for a hare, the slope looked so natural that I wondered at my fears. Then I remembered that there were only nine inches of earth between me and discovery, and I thought of the cowardliness of my act and the cruelty of this lonely death. Yet it was certain that powerful friends knew of his death or disappearance, and would do whatever had to be done.

The stones from the wall were on the plowed field where I had left them. I don’t know what the next-door farmer, to whom this field belonged, made of them. Possibly he assumed that Blossom, with whom he was on very neutral terms, had needed some stones for walling and would clean up the mess in due season. Which of them owned this worthless little plot, with its trees and ruins and nettles, I never found out.

I sat down and ate my sandwiches at the top of the shoot, and as I let my eyes wander over the loved, familiar rise and fall of the land, I became aware that there was a question to be put to it. Those two men who nearly caught me– what were they doing in the northeast corner of the shoot? There was no reason why they should look for me at that end of the boundary hedge, and I was sure I hadn’t made enough noise to attract them. Then suppose that they were not looking for me at all–had given it up, and were on their way back to the road? On their way back from what?

I found enough of their tracks to prove that they had come from the west, along a cattle-proof hedge that divided Blossom’s down. Beyond it, the down ran on in a great expanse of close rabbit turf which had never been plowed. Close to the hedge were dense, rounded thickets of bramble that looked like the huts of a kaffir kraal. They repeated so exactly those domes and bastions where the dead man had been at work that I wondered if the same mysterious activity might not have been carried on.

On my way home I felt, with a vague soldier’s instinct, that the clue to the action must be found in the lie of the land. Yet never was there a more innocent patch of geography. Before me, to the south, was a great semicircle of rolling country, ending in the coastal hills. The smooth hogback where I was gave no impression of height and rose so gradually that it was not conspicuous or in any way a landmark; it was merely the highest point, level, spacious and remote, in a green bowl of farms and villages.

A week passed and nothing happened. I could almost accept an unexpected ring at the doorbell with equanimity. At any rate I had no longer to force myself into unnatural calm. The weather was vile. There were two days of gale with torrents of rain, and then a thick fog came up from the Channel. This suited me well. I went on foot to the pit, not even risking a bicycle in case it should be seen and recognized, and created the appearance of a landslip which had dragged a thorn tree lose from its roots. Thereafter the spot was covered by enough earth and tangled vegetation to discourage man or dog.

The following Saturday afternoon I went out again with my gun, and came on old Blossom and one of his men carting hay from a stack in the southern meadows. He called me over when I shouted a good-afternoon, and on the other side of the cart I found his landlord, Robert Heyne-Hassingham. Blossom introduced me as the man who had taken his shooting, and Heyne-Hassingham at once turned on the charm.

He had plenty of it, part hereditary and part acquired as a practicing politician. He was an excellent landlord and a man of considerable influence in the county–indeed, in all the West of England. During the war he had been chosen, it was said, as the underground leader for a very wide area in the event of a successful German invasion.

After the war, however, he became a slightly comic figure to the average citizen, for he began to take politics as seriously as any ardent socialist. He founded the People’s Union which had a lot of publicity till the newspapers grew tired of it. It was a sort of Boy’s Brigade for grownups, full of Ideals, Service and Religion. Any religion would do. It appealed to disgruntled ex-servicemen, and was supposed to have a following among regular officers of the Army and Navy–a threat that we hadn’t known since Cromwell’s day. To the plain Englishman, however, who keeps his Ideals, Service and Religion packed away in the gun room, well-oiled and ready for use but emphatically out of reach of the children, the People’s Union was offensive. It had a somewhat fascist smell of hierarchy. It paid lip service to democracy, of course, but there was no doubt that if Heyne-Hassingham and his choirboys ever came to power –which no one thought remotely possible but themselves –Parliament would be even more of a rubber stamp than it is.

As I say, he turned on the charm, and naturally enough I was flattered and began to think–as one usually does on meeting an eminent public man in the flesh–that I had greatly misjudged him. He discussed gun and game, talked of old days when his father and the gamekeepers had brought up thousands of pheasants by hand, and asked me if I thought the pheasant was establishing itself successfully as a purely wild bird. I had no doubt that it was.

He knew his countryside, though I had the impression that he was entertaining me with what he had heard rather than what he had observed. That thin, rather ascetic face didn’t really belong to our wealth of slow life.

“Your grandfather was a great friend of our family, Colonel Taine,” he said.

“Mr. Taine,” I corrected him.

Inverted snobbery, I suppose. But it’s ridiculous for an ordinary businessman to go walking about as a colonel.

“I was only thinking,” he smiled, “how proud the old boy would have been of a grandson who commanded his battalion and collected all your gongs on the way.”

I didn’t believe that my grandfather had any connection with the Heyne-Hassinghams–except that he sold them a famous ram of his own breeding–but I accepted this lush suggestion of friendship. Grandfather, if he visited their house at all, would certainly have made some memorable inroads on the Heyne-Hassingham cellar before parting with his ram.

“The country needs men like you,” he said.

That was an invitation, but I wasn’t having any.

“We are a bit short of plain, contented chaps,” I answered.

“That is you?”

“It is.”

“You’re rare then, and you’re very lucky,” he said. “But, believe me, in too many other cases content grows into self-satisfaction.”

He asked us both to stroll as far as his car with him, playing the busy man who did not want to part from agreeable company but had to account for every minute of his time. His conversation was now mostly with Blossom, and about the high down. In answer to his questions Blossom, I remember, told him that the growth of grass had been disappointing that dry summer, and that he wasn’t putting any cattle or sheep on the down till the spring.

The car had been left on the upper road, so we passed that fatal angle of the boundary hedge. It was exactly as I and the dead man had left it, except that rain had cleared away the blood, if there ever was any, and restored the grass.

“By the way, Mr. Blossom,” Heyne-Hassingham asked, “have you agreed with your neighbor to leave that gap open, or is there a right of way?”

“Always bin open, and we keep ‘un open,” Blossom replied noncommittally.

Heyne-Hassingham asked if strangers ever wandered through that way, and was told they didn’t. Then his attention seemed to be drawn by the swarms of rabbits, and he wanted to know if Blossom sold the trapping. Blossom did. All game above ground was mine, but a professional trapper paid a useful sum for the right to take game below ground. He usually spent four or five nights after Christmas clearing out the big warrens.

Heyne-Hassingham kept on with his cross-examination. He stayed in character as an interested landlord, but was persistent as any lawyer.

“Is there any illicit trapping by local bad lads?” he asked.

“Not if Mr. Taine don’t. ‘E should learn, ‘e should! Bit o’ wire and f is old breeches, that’s all ‘e needs. Comes cheaper than bangin’ off fourpence!”

Blossom chuckled and puffed under his scarves and waistcoats, and gave me an enormous wink to assure me he wasn’t to be taken seriously.

“Up here often at night?” Heyne-Hassingham inquired, as if carrying on the joke.

“I? Never.”

This conversation made me uneasy. It might be innocent, but it was near enough to the bone to put me on my guard. And that was as well, for, when we came to the car, there was the handsome, nervous face which I had last seen staring, for a split second, at the dead companion in the bramble bush.

The man was leaning against Heyne-Hassingham’s car with a rather too conscious grace. He was in his early forties, lean, hard and able. I think that even then I spotted him as the type of staff officer whom one most dislikes but from whom one cannot withhold respect. Heyne-Hassingham introduced him as Colonel Hiart.

“This is Mr. Taine,” he said, “who rents the shooting up here.”

There was a hardly perceptible note of mischief in his voice as he gave me my civilian title. He guessed just what I was going to think of Hiart, and let me know–if I were clever enough to see it–that the contrast between us amused him. He was a subtle and likable creature. Natural enough, I suppose. If he hadn’t been, he could never have founded and held the devotion of his People’s Union.

Hiart shook hands. His narrow, dark eyes were laid on me as directly and expressionlessly as the guns of a tank.

“Do you shoot?” I asked him.

“I fear,” he said, “that I find it noisy and unnecessary.”

“I’d find it unnecessary too,” I retorted, “if I still had army rations. But I must admit I enjoy it. I’ll also admit that I think I ought not to.”

That was a perfectly sincere remark; I wasn’t acting. Afterwards, when I knew a little more of Hiart, I saw that I couldn’t have answered better. He had intended deliberately to provoke some reaction, probably brutal, which would give him a line on my character. I wouldn’t like to say what he made of the reaction that in fact he got, but he must have thought it unlikely that I was a man to shoot strangers and remove their bodies.

When the car had driven away and Blossom had returned to his hay carting, I started to tramp through the roots for partridge. It was merely to put up a show of activity. The coveys were far too wild at the end of October to be walked up.

I was perplexed, and in the blackest depression. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt that Heyne-Hassingham and his tame colonel had come over to Blossom’s farm on a Saturday afternoon in the hope of finding me, that they considered me a possible suspect, or, alternatively, a possible ally. All the tripe Heyne-Hassingham had talked about my grandfather’s friendship for his family seemed to indicate that he wanted my own.

Ally in what? That I couldn’t answer. I was shocked and alarmed to discover that Heyne-Hassingham, prominent, patriotic and above suspicion, was connected with the runaway Hiart, with the violence of that nocturnal attempt on me, with a motorcycle so compromising that it had to be left abandoned and unclaimed.

I pulled myself together by remembering that only a week before I had expected every hour to be hauled in by the police for questioning. Well, that hadn’t happened and seemed unlikely to happen, but I began to think I would prefer the police to this fog of uncertainty. I didn’t know whom to protect myself against. I even wondered whether I had interfered by my mysterious, unaccountable shot with some private action of the Intelligence Services. That, if it were so, made my guilt a thousand times worse.

When I got home, there was further evidence that somebody was interested in my movements.

“Have you got a cigarette case that doesn’t belong to you?” Cecily asked.

“No. Why?”

She said that a man had called up and wanted to know if I had found his case. She replied that I hadn’t told her anything, and asked him where he had lost it. When he dined with me the week before last, he said, and added:

“Let’s see. When was that?”

Now, this is a cautionary story for children on the virtue of never having secrets from one’s wife. Cecily knew perfectly well that if I dined with anyone at all, I should have come home full of it.

“Wednesday, of course,” he said.

That disastrous Wednesday, October 19th, when I had ostensibly been in Salisbury, was the only day I could have dined out. Any other wife, piqued at the fact that my doings had been exceptional and puzzling, would have eagerly swallowed the bait; but Cecily smelled something wrong with it.

“No,” she had answered instinctively. “The only night he was out was Saturday.”

She saw the relief in my face. It may be that she even heard a gasp of tension freed. By sheer good sense she had ruled me out as a possible suspect.

“Darling,” she asked anxiously, “you haven’t… ?”

“Yes? What?”

“Well, done anything against the law. But it’s impossible.”

I avoided the direct answer.

“He was trying to find out if I came home late that night,” I said.

I told her, on the spur of the moment and very unconvincingly, that I was investigating a racket in building materials for my firm, and trying to get evidence that the police could not. She accepted it, but she knew very well that I would have told her that much long before, even if I didn’t give the details. And she knew that I knew. There was nothing whatever hidden from either of us, except a bit of prosaic fact.

Cecily went upstairs to put the children to bed, and I gave myself a stiff gin. It did so much good that I had two more. The evening story turned out to be rather more imaginative than usual.

I was always allowed a wild twenty minutes with the children after their bath and before they were finally tucked up. This period was spent in some romp or other–suppressed by Cecily if it promised to be too exciting for sleep –or in stories. My two sons, Jerry aged seven and George aged five, had a taste, which I tried to satisfy, for improbabilities. Not fairies, but something near the shaggy dog story was what they liked. That night I started one about a nest of ants in the garden. When petrol was poured down the hole to destroy them, out they all came, saying thank-you-very-much and driving a communal car.

Cecily listened to the end of the story, and then we had supper in rather less silence than had been the custom for the last ten days. I warned her that if anyone seemed anxious to find out where I had been after dusk on the eighteenth and up to midnight on the nineteenth, she was to remember that I had been at home. And–as these people seemed clever at misusing the telephone–I suggested a code for our personal service. If I myself were on the telephone and I carried on with the ant story for the children, it meant that I was on this secret job and she must be wary. Anyone purporting to give her a message from me would also mention ants.

It was no good to worry, no good to break in any way from my routine. Routine is a powerful drug, helping a sufferer to live on condition that he accepts a slightly deadened existence. So I worked hard and regularly during the week, and took my Saturday afternoon as usual on the shoot. It was the fifth of November, two and a half weeks from the death of the unknown.

The warren was still undisturbed. So, apparently, were my nerves, for I shot a hare almost on the edge of the pit. Then I walked back the length of the down, getting nothing at all on the way, towards the stacks and richer fields at the southern end of the farm.

I was just turning into the track which led past the barn and down to the valley, when, some way ahead of me and on the other side of a gate, I saw a small, tweedy, sporty-looking man earnestly watching the long grass in front of him.

“Hi, you!” he shouted. “Stay just where you are!”

“Why?”

“Wait and see!”

He accompanied this order with a cheerful wave of his stick, and made gestures with his free hand in the direction of the field. He doubled round the angle of the hedge and disappeared.

His commanding voice had sounded thoroughly friendly, so I obeyed. Then I saw him crash through one of Blossom’s neatest fences, as if he had had a horse between his legs, and up got the partridges. He was astonishingly right in his judgment. They skimmed across my front into the turnips, and I got a quick right and left which must have looked quite showy from where he was standing.

“Thank you” I said when he came up. “How on earth did you know what they’d do on strange ground?”

“Brought up with ‘em,” he answered. “Liked ‘em for breakfast. One for me, brace for Father.”

He was a fiery-looking little bouncer, about five and a half feet high with a pointed face and a thin sandy mustache. There was a network of scars on one side of his chin, and he had a slight limp which suggested still another war wound. His age was unguessable–somewhere between forty and fifty-five. Whatever it was, he was undoubtedly fighting fit, and his movements were fast and jerky as those of a well-strung puppet.

We had a short conversation–one of those curious interchanges wherein nothing whatever is revealed but instant mutual sympathy. I found myself saying:

“I can’t offer you much sport, but if It would amuse you to join me up here any week end, I’d be delighted.”

It was a wildly impulsive offer, especially as I had every reason to be suspicious of strangers. But he was so obviously a man from whom I could learn.

“No good!” he replied. “Right eye gone. Pop in-pop out. Marble! Ever seen one?”

He handed me his right eye, and I bowed to it. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“Try a left-hand gun,” I suggested.

“Yes. Some day. But no time since the war. Where did you learn to shoot?”

“I’m a farmer’s son.”

“And what do you do now?”

“Sell stone.”

“Tombstones, ha?” he exploded joyfully. “But you look like a soldier.”

“Well, I’ve been that too.”

“What rank?”

“Lieutenant colonel of sorts.”

“Didn’t I say so? Once a colonel, always a colonel,” he decreed. “Commanded your battalion?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Staff jobs too?”

“Never!”

“Decorations?”

“Damn you, what business is it of yours?” I retorted. “Who the hell are you?”

“Me? A murderer.”

I thought I had got him placed at last. The Dorset Mental Hospital wasn’t far away, and they used to let out the less eccentric inmates for quiet country walks.

“First or second?” I asked.

“Eh? First, of course! Who wants to be a second murderer?”

“All the risk and none of the fun,” I agreed soothingly. “What did you do to your victim?”

“Shot him. Shot him in the back right here somewhere.”

“Why?”

“That’s just what I don’t know. I’ve been looking for a chap like you to tell me.”

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“Why I am supposed to have killed a man hereabouts,” he answered, staring me straight in the eyes with a flash of the sanest and grimmest humor I ever saw.

So he wasn’t a lunatic. So he knew that someone had met his death on my shoot. Was he a detective, or one of Heyne-Hassingham’s people? How much did he know, and how did he know anything at all? Was it true that he himself had been accused of firing the shot?

It was impossible to answer any of those questions, so I tried to keep my face in its same casual and friendly expression, and play for time. I decided to carry on in his own chosen atmosphere of eccentricity.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There’s a lot of people I’d shoot on sight. Back or front, ha! Which of them was this?”

“But did you kill him?”

“No. Did you?”

“Do I look as if I’d shoot a man in the back?” I replied with all the indignation I could pretend.

“Yes. Don’t be a hypocrite! Never shot a German in the back? Must happen. Law of averages. Sometimes they’re coming. Sometimes they’re going. Colonel, I have watched the face of every man who visits this hilltop. You are the only one who would stick at nothing, and whose aim I’d trust–and, if I may say so, whom I’d trust myself.”

“Shall we tell your story to the police?” I asked.

“Think they’d understand it, do you, ha? I don’t!”

“Will you tell it to me, then?”

“Certainly. Let us sit down.”

“Not here,” I said.

“Why? Wind too cold, or-?”

“Or,” I answered, taking the gamble.

I led him through the gate and over onto the steep western slope of the down. A narrow sheep path twisted into the heart of one of the clumps of furze, and opened out onto a patch of turf the size of a small room. There we were safe from observation, and overlooked the lower road that wound along the stream, past Blossom’s farm, from village to village.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

“To hell with it!” he answered as if taking a sudden decision. “General of Cavalry Peter Sandorski of the Polish Army.”

“You’re in one of these resettlement camps?”

“Resettle my backside!” he replied.

“I was only wondering where you picked up English,” I explained.

“English governess.”

“She must have been an exceptional woman.”

“We had English grooms, too. Pay your penny, and take your choice.”

“Whom did you fight for?”

“Poland,” he answered drily.

“I meant–with what army after the defeat?”

“The partition,” he corrected me. “Oh, first the Russians, then the Germans. No other way of killing both, was there?”

“And you live in England?”

“Under the sky, my sympathetic colonel. Under the sky.”

Then he told me as much of his story as he thought fit for me to hear. I don’t know how many secret organizations he served when it suited him–indeed I doubt if he knew himself–but one was his own, formed by him and led by him. This private intelligence unit of his had picked up in the Western Zone of Germany an S.S. man with whom they had a seven-year-old account to settle.

Now, the real reason why Sandorski’s people–who, he insisted, were plain nonparty Polish officers and good Europeans–had kidnapped this brute was punishment, revenge, whatever you like to call it; and in due season they quietly dropped his weighted body into the Danube.

“I am a Pole, not a judge at Nuremberg,” Sandorski said to me sharply, noticing my shocked and–now I come to think of it–hypocritical expression.

Before they disposed of him, however, they interrogated him. He talked quite freely. Being a foolish and sentimental German, he didn’t think anybody would bother to kidnap and punish him for crimes he had committed seven years earlier. He assumed that these free-lance Poles had picked him up because they wanted to question him about his recent doings, and he was ready enough to answer. He probably hoped they might employ him as a professional thug. And so he confessed a story that no one had ever suspected.

He had just returned, he said, from England.

What had he been up to there? He had been flown over, he replied, for a special job, landing he didn’t know where; nor did he know–for plans had been changed–what the job was to be. Immediately after his arrival he had been given a temporary assignment–and that was to catch Sandorski with the body of a man he had murdered the previous night.

The S.S. man was asked who told him that the killer was Sandorski. He replied that the dead man had had a companion who escaped, and that the companion had said it was Sandorski. He didn’t know the name of either the dead man or his companion.

From whom, then, did he take his orders, the interrogator asked. From an Englishman, he replied, with the cover name of Pink. A former naval officer, he believed. Pink was his contact, and Pink and he had gone out together to discover what Sandorski had been doing, and to catch him if they got a chance.

Had they seen him? Yes, and chased him. But Pink had been very doubtful if it was Sandorski at all. They had only got a glimpse of his back, once bent down as he ran and once leaning over the handlebars of a bicycle. He had wrecked their motor bike and sidecar, and vanished.

“Now then,” said Peter Sandorski, cutting short his narrative, “I have friends everywhere. Even in your British Intelligence Services, when I behave myself. I asked them where, on the nineteenth of October, a motorcycle was abandoned. No driver. No claim. The answer was precise. Of military exactitude, with a map reference. So here I am. I have watched. I have listened. I think I have identified the wall which was being pulled down when Pink and his late friend interrupted the person they thought was me. Colonel, if you could tell me whom I am supposed to have killed, you would do a service to your country. I tell you that–” he jumped up among the furze bushes and stood to attention–”on my honor as an officer.”

I had no intention of confessing to him that I myself was the killer; nor, I think, did he then suspect it. He had been silently watching and weighing all the local people who could conceivably be mixed up in any sort of violent action, and had quite rightly assumed that I was the only one. Thereupon he had at once found–or forced, rather –a common sympathy.

I determined to measure out the information I would give. I had nothing to go on but liking and disapproval of him. This gallant little eccentric seemed to have a disregard for human life that was two hundred years out of date. But it could have been worse. He might have had a wholly modern disregard.

“Age about forty,” I said. “Solid build and especially broad across the hips. Dressed in a windbreaker and tweed trousers. I can’t tell you much about his coloring.”

“Height?” he asked.

“Medium. About an inch taller than you.”

“That is tall,” he insisted severely. “Nose? Chin?”

“Nose, nothing in particular. Jaw, square.”

“Can I have a look at him?”

“No.”

“Dig him up,” he suggested.

“How should I know where he is?”

“Mention of a spade. Who grabbed it on the road?”

“You did. And Pink will swear to it in court if it suits him.”

“Colonel, my governess had a word for you.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I’ve a wife and family.”

“Right! Seen it a dozen times. Just love and kisses, and a man’s a bloody hero. Give him a couple of children, and he’s got to know what he’s fighting for. Now, you’re in this, but if I’m not wrong–and when I’m talking to a born soldier I’m never wrong–I don’t believe you know what you’re in or why.”

I didn’t reply. The general’s intuition or judgment of character was far too dangerous.

“Now, how am I going to put it?” he went on. “Ever read state trials? Russia and elsewhere?”

“I used to.”

“Don’t wonder you stopped! Think the evidence is all faked, ha? Well, it isn’t. Men who confess they are guilty are guilty. What of? There we have it! Guilty of muddle. And it doesn’t take any drugs or tortures to make them confess it. Of course they are muddled. Why? Because the bosses are muddled. There’s no firm creed. That’s the thing to remember. A creed is what the leader says it is, and no more.

“That makes it easy to muscle in on the racket. Just like Hitler and Mussolini. You have to start as a socialist–that’s all–and then you have to muddle. Tell the workingman that you’re going to avoid all the errors of communism and democracy, and that you’re just going to exercise a little benevolent dictatorship until things are running properly.

“And that, Colonel my lad, is what is going on. Party here, party there, all supporting each other all over Europe. Couriers, money, beautiful agreements on paper. It’s nothing but a new fascism.”

“You’re employed by your government?” I asked.

“Colonel, I would be shot on sight if I set foot in Poland.”

“Then revolution ought to suit you.”

“Well, it doesn’t. Revolution would be the end of Poland. We Poles are all patriots, even the communists. We play for time. We wait for destiny. We want stability. A group of Hitlers, all jumping up simultaneously, all promising peace and plenty, where would that get you or me, ha? I tell you, there’s one of ‘em ready in every country from the Urals to Ireland.”

“Who’s ours?” I asked skeptically. “Pink?”

“Pink? These men are near the top! All of them different kinds of socialist. I don’t know yet who yours is. Might be–” and he mentioned three ministers, each of whom, certainly, was so mystically sure of his own Tightness and benevolence that he would have qualified as a budding Hitler.

“Ever heard of Robert Heyne-Hassingham?” I asked.

He had; but the name meant little to him. He only knew, through his investigations into the neo-fascist cells abroad, that there was a corresponding underground in England, and that it carried on under cover of some respectable movement.

“Or of a Colonel Hiart?”

“Hiart? Head of your Intelligence Service in during the war. What’s he doing now? Brilliant fellow but crazy with nerves. Hated firearms because they went bang. Always seeing assassins under his bed, ha?”

“The sort of chap who might imagine General Sandorski when the general was on the other side of the Channel?”

“Colonel, I order you–I beg you, tell me what you know.”

“I know something damned odd is going on over my shoot,” I replied. “And that’s all. Where are you staying?”

“The mental hospital,” he announced with a sly pride. “My doctor is there.”

All my original doubts came back.

“Of course,” I agreed. “They are right up to date.”

He leaped to his feet in a passion, and popped down again as flat on his face as if he had just been missed by a sniper.

“Chap up there,” he said.

I raised a cautious head and peered through the furze. There was indeed a chap up there, going for a leisurely country walk. I recognized him at once as the man who had watched Blossom’s gate and bridge.

“When I say my doctor,” Sandorski hissed, “I mean my doctor before the war. If I were mad, you bloody fool, would they have made me a general?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never studied the Polish campaign.”