Текст книги "A Rough Shoot "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 8 страниц)

That went right over his head. He was much too angry. When the walker had passed us and was safely out of earshot, he told me that his prewar doctor had joined the staff of the Dorset Mental Hospital with a bunch of other highly qualified refugees from Poland and Lithuania; till he learned English, he was acting only as a superior orderly, but he had a pleasant cottage in the grounds, and there was no reason in the world why he shouldn’t have a friend to stay with him.

Sandorski’s improvisation was brilliant, and he had every right to be proud of it. The mental hospital was a self-contained world, and neither police nor Heyne-Hassingham would ever bother about its guests. One just didn’t think of it as having any. Moreover, if some interested person noticed anything eccentric in Sandorski’s behavior and chose to watch him–as easily I might myself–his disappearance into those well-kept grounds would effectively stop further inquiries.

“Can I see you there?” I asked.

“Why not? Any time you like.”

“Be there between nine and ten tomorrow.”

And I told him that he mustn’t go near my house, which might be watched. I also warned him that he might be seen by someone who knew him.

“Colonel, my lad,” he replied superbly, “you are an infantryman. When the cavalry charges, it is always likely to be seen.”

Well, that was fine when he was all alone and deliberately provoking any sort of incident that would reveal the enemy. I suggested, however, that since his dash and tactics had been so successful, the cavalry, for the moment, had better go into reserve.

“And now do something for me,” I asked. “Telephone this number, and tell my wife that Mr. Taine won’t be back till after dark, and tell her that they tried oil on the ants who complained it was the wrong grade for summer.”

He was very suspicious. After all, I had explained nothing.

“Just a father’s ruse to prove his identity,” I assured him.

I showed him a route back to the loony bin, where he would be safe from observation till he was well away from Blossom’s farm. I myself went off in the opposite direction, for I was interested by the country walker. I saw him finish his stroll along the edge of the escarpment, and vanish into a little copse at the point where the slope curved round to the east. I hurried after, keeping well under the brow of the hill where he couldn’t see me, and reached a clump of rough stuff below and outside the copse.

He was, as I expected, just within the trees–an excellent position from which he could watch the road at the bottom of the valley and the green track along the top. Once or twice he raised his field glasses to examine traffic on the road. Apart from that slight movement he was so absorbed by duty that an incautious rabbit put its head out of a bramble bush within five yards of him.

That was a wonderful chance to study his reactions. I shot the rabbit dead, and had the satisfaction of seeing him jump and drop his glasses. He didn’t make any instinctive leap for cover, however, so it was reasonably clear he had heard nothing of any acts of violence in the neighborhood.

“By Jove!” I exclaimed. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you.”

I picked up the rabbit, and smiled at him with what I hoped was an expression of innocence and concern.

“This is intolerable,” he complained. “Intolerable! Careless brutality! Have you no thought at all of the suffering you cause to harmless creatures?”

His voice was like the whine of a bagpipe, and his little feet danced to it with indignation.

“We all must eat.” I said.

“Have you not enough to eat with what the government allows you? A carefully balanced diet approved by all the statisticians? Killing for food should be left to those who can distribute economically, and understand it.”

“At least I understand it,” I replied with a grin, swinging the rabbit at him. “He didn’t suffer at all.”

“Improper!” he squalled.

“Is your objection on religious grounds?”

“Certainly not. I have no religion. My objection is that these sports of the rich, these remnants of feudalism, are antisocial.”

“But I’m not rich.”

“Then if you are not, you should set an example.”

He was a lovely little man. I didn’t want to lose him till he had told me everything he knew; so I apologized, and asked to be shown the light. He recommended several pamphlets which, I gathered, pleaded for the trap as more humane than the gun. I promised to read them. Then I asked him if he were on holiday.

“As much as I allow myself,” he replied. “I am studying the collection of essential statistics for a backward rural area

“Splendid! Who for?”

“The Workers’ Improvement Society.”

“A labor organization?”

“Certainly not! It is one of the extraparliamentary activities of the People’s Union.”

You had only to see him, to hear his limited little mind at talk, to know that he couldn’t be anything else but sincere. He was just the sort of chap who could be employed for any dirty trick with absolute confidence that he wouldn’t see it so long as he felt useful and important. I am sure I should have accepted him at face value if I hadn’t known better, and especially if I hadn’t known–for about an hour–that the People’s Union under Heyne-Hassingham was subtle and dangerous at home and abroad as the young Nazi or Communist parties.

“What are you checking up here?” I asked.

“Parallel movement, and the proportion of pedestrians and transport using a nonmetaled track in preference to a secondary road, and their reasons. I shall put down your own reason as the destruction of wild life.”

“Call it rodent control,” I answered. “What do you do with your statistics when you’ve got them?”

“A colleague of mine correlates them.”

“And anyone out for a country walk–how does he fit in?”

“I ask him firmly what he is doing,” he replied, “and explain my motives with official courtesy. If in fact he is going for a country walk, I make a note of his income bracket and description, and enter his name in the column Non-Economic Activities.”

“How long have you been at it?”

“Since October 19th.”

“Description of every person seen, ha?”

I had caught that confoundedha?from Sandorski.

“I am assured it is essential to avoid duplication.”

“Sounds as if you were being trained for the police,” I said.

He blushed, positively blushed. Blowed if I hadn’t penetrated the secret hopes that had been held out to him!

“The police are politically untrained and unreliable,” he spluttered.

It was enough. I couldn’t have kept a straight face any longer–though it was really a matter for tears that such a man could ask his silly questions and be treated with deference in our once merry England. I said good-by, renewed my apologies, and kept him under observation from a distance. I didn’t have to wait long. He marched down to the village, as importantly as the steep slope allowed.

Since listening to Sandorski I had made a pretty confident guess at what the value of my shoot was to the interested parties. Sandorski had talked quite casually of agents being flown in and out of England. The newspapers, too, often carried stories of smuggling by air, and of the difficulty of police and customs control. The down was no landing field, but there was a level strip a good third of a mile long, with a rough but well-drained surface. It was quite good enough for any aircraft with a low landing speed. I also remembered Heyne-Hassingham’s conversation with Blossom. Hadn’t he been very anxious to know that there were no sheep or cattle on the down?

It was dusk, the best time to see and not be seen. I didn’t dare to approach the angle of the hedge where the dead man had been busy with his spirit level and spiked supports. Lord knew what ingenious devices there might be to record the passage of anyone pottering about! I decided, however, that I might risk a look at the northern end of the supposed airstrip. The uninterrupted level passed diagonally across the shoot, and ended in that kaffir kraal of doomed bramble bushes from which Pink and his late thug had been coming when they surprised me.

I knew more or less where to search–where the longest possible level line from the fatal angle of the hedge intersected the southern edge of the brambles. That wasn’t so vague as it sounds, for the clumps, when you got among them, were widely separated, and there weren’t more than half a dozen on the likely line.

I found what I wanted, a bush with the interior hollowed out. The entrance was well hidden, and to be detected only by the trampled grass. A casual eye would have put the disturbance down to cows. There were plenty of them munching the short turf here on the safe side of the hedge, where they couldn’t get in the way of a whirling propeller.

Inside the bush was enough empty space for a man to kneel without getting thorns in his head or twigs down his collar. The light, which outside was fast fading, was a deep elephant gray, revealing neither outline nor perspective. I hadn’t a torch with me, so I lit match after match, placing the burnt ends carefully in my pocket. The hole had been cleaned up–so far as it was possible to clean a floor of indefinite vegetable debris–but I got my evidence: half an inch of insulated copper wire, a bit of thin broken glass that suggested a bulb or radio valve, four holes in the ground, and some filings and chips of bright metal that would have been indistinguishable in daylight, and twinkled like stars in the light of a match.

Then, pushing accidentally against the side of the hollow, I found still clearer and wholly unsuspected evidence. There was a little alcove or bay, stuffed up with dead bramble stalks. I parted them carefully and saw, driven into the ground and leveled, four supports, identical with those I had buried by the side of their owner in the rabbit warren, all ready for what they were to hold.

Now I had a picture and the beginning of a pattern; and immediately the dull weight upon my conscience vanished. Whether morally it should have done so, I doubt; for I was neither more nor less guilty than before of causing the death of a man. But from this moment on, crime assumed the amoral, inconsequent quality of a death that one has caused in war.

When I got home–after some cautious reconnaissance to ensure that nobody was interested in the time I returned –I was horrified to notice how drawn and weary my Cecily looked. She must have had that worry upon her face for a couple of weeks, and I hadn’t noticed it. It would be truer to say that I hadn’t wished to notice it. I had a wild romp with Jerry and George, and was told off by her in the normal way for exciting them before they went to bed. There was a note of relief in her half-angry protest. The house seemed to have returned to its accustomed casual happiness.

“Your friend has a nice voice,” she said to me when we were alone, “but he shouldn’t pretend to be English.”

“Good Lord, he could pass anywhere!”

“Not with women. He’s too gallant.”

“On the telephone?”

“He told me what I looked like from the way I spoke.”

“And do you?”

“I hope so,” she laughed.

Then she started to talk of our friends, flitting inconsequently from one to another. It was that sort of monologue to which a husband can go on answering hm and ah so long as he takes care to look intelligent and interested. What did I think of this one and that? And their wives? And their daughters? I tried not to show that most of them bored me, for that might have reflected upon Cecily’s ability to make them interesting–and small blame to her, for even their Maker had failed! It was only after half an hour of this that I spotted she was trying to find out–from my enthusiasm or studied carelessness–whether I wasn’t running some clandestine affair under cover of the pretended building racket.

I kept this brilliant discovery to myself, for I didn’t want to hurt her pride. If a woman has pride and joy, you cannot help loving her. I suppose they all know that, and rather wish they didn’t.

In the morning–much to her annoyance on a Sunday– I had business between nine and ten. I called on Sandorski, and found him in a turtle-neck sweater glowing with foxy health, after, no doubt, some crazily strenuous daily dozen and a hearty lunatic’s breakfast. His host, the doctor, having been on night duty, was asleep.

“My shoot,” I told him, “is a landing ground. They mean to put movable radio beacons at both ends of the strip. When you shot that friend of yours he was arranging an emplacement for the southern beacon. The strip has not yet been used, but it’s going to be. It’s high ground clear of obstructions, remote, level, and the landowner is in this up to the neck.”

“It won’t be used,” he answered, “because they know somebody found them out.”

“Nobody found them out. They have been wondering whether I mightn’t be guilty. If it wasn’t me, it could be a poacher.”

I decided to trust him. It was pointless to go on mystifying a wholehearted ally who had hidden little or nothing from me. I told him how the accident really happened. He guffawed at my words of regret.

“Lord!” he yelled. “I once did the same thing to my uncle! Lord! We both had our breakfast off the mantelpiece for a week!”

Then he bounced about like a little boy with an urgent need, shouting:

“Air pistol! Air pistol! Air pistol!”

“Mean anything to you?”

“Riemann! That’s the man you shot. Colonel, my lad! If Riemann has had it, you’ve done me a favor. Now, whom was he with?”

“Your Colonel Hiart,” I replied, “if it’s the same colonel you knew. Tall, thin, sunburnt, dark. Very sensitive and intelligent face. Can stand still indefinitely, which most people can’t. And likely to know that Peter Sandorski was after his companion.”

“That’s him! No soldier–never was! But knows everything! Guesses what I’m working on. Guesses I might catch up with Riemann any day. General of Cavalry–that would frighten him, ha? Second sight, but a bloody pansy–” and he went into details.

“But you grant him a flair?”

“Cleverest man in Europe, when he isn’t too scared to think.”

“Right! Now, suppose he went over the ground in daylight, there must have been plenty of evidence for a trained eye. I don’t believe I ever picked up the empty cartridge. And when he’d pulled himself together, he might remember the difference of sound between a gun and a rifle. Damn it, he’s a soldier, and he must have heard plenty of both, even if he doesn’t like ‘em! And wouldn’t he check up where you were at the time? It’s a fair old puzzle, but he ought to know the death or disappearance of Riemann had nothing to do with the airstrip.”

“Hiart, ha?” he answered, as if the man’s reactions were not to be judged by ordinary standards. “You or a poacher at eighty yards? It might occur to him. But he wouldn’t rule out straight revenge on Riemann. And I don’t think they’ll use the airstrip.”

“Then why have they put back the supports for the beacon?”

“How do you know they ever took ‘em away?”

“Because they’d have taken a horrid risk if they didn’t and because I’ve seen the four holes where the spikes were before. That’s what Pink and your S.S. man were doing just before they nearly caught me–pulling up the supports and hiding them somewhere.”

He snorted agreement.

“Who’s employing Hiart?” he asked.

I gave him a picture of Heyne-Hassingham and a lecture on the People’s Union, bringing in the earnest statistician as an example. It all fitted–an organization at bottom hysterical, but in practice efficient, impudent and with an appeal to the ruthless idealist.

“The rest, during the week, is up to you, General,” I said, “because I have to earn my living. What we want to know is when those beacons go into position. And I’ll tell you what time to watch. Not in daylight because there are too many people about. Not at night because they won’t want to show a lot of artificial light. But at dusk, after the farm laborers have gone home. And I think they’ll also want to be sure that I am in my office and not taking an afternoon off.”

“And what then?”

“We go to the police, I suppose.”

“Any evidence?”

“The beacons.”

“Colonel, my lad,” he smiled, “just work it out! What will the police do? Send up a couple of constables to check your story. Somebody will see ‘em or hear ‘em, and that’s the end of the airstrip.

“What’s the next move, ha? Anonymous information to the police that Colonel Taine may be using his shoot as a little private Garden of Remembrance. With all the details. You try and deny ‘em. Especially if they say you bumped him off on the nineteenth, when the motorcycle was found, not the eighteenth. Where’s your alibi? What’s your story? People’s Union? You must be a political maniac. Heyne-Hassingham and Hiart? Above suspicion! Where did you put that body, by the way?”

“Where it will take a lot of finding,” I answered sulkily.

“Think so? I’ve had some experience. So has Scotland Yard. I’ll tell you the alternatives. Under the manure heap in the barn. In the middle of a bush–but unless you were in a tearing hurry, we’ll rule that out. Any heap of stones. Or the pit where the dead sheep are. Ha? Ha, pokerface? Now, you leave it all to me.”

Sandorski pointed out that for a job of this kind–and he said he had organized enough of them to know–an aircraft had to have a fairly respectable base and a reason for leaving it. Therefore it would take off in daylight. Therefore it would arrive before midnight. And if it were going to land within five hundred yards of a road, the organizers must be sure of a dark night with no moon. That gave Wednesday, Thursday or Friday as the most likely dates. He didn’t think they would risk leaving the beacons in position; they would bring them out to the field on the night the plane was expected. I was just, he repeated, to leave it to him.

I did so, with some misgivings on the Polish Cavalry’s conception of intelligence work. Colonel Hiart, with his extreme caution, seemed a more desirable model. We agreed that Sandorski would telephone me at my home if the beacons were put up, and that I would join him within an hour at the haystacks above Blossom’s farmhouse–a rendezvous which both of use felt certain we could reach in darkness without being observed. Just in case they had a man to spare for watching my door, I said I would go out at the back and walk across the hills to the shoot.

On the Wednesday, soon after I returned to the office from lunch, I had a telephone call from someone who sounded like a harassed and indecisive farmer and asked me if I would be in at five as he wished to consult me about new types of porous flooring for poultry runs. He seemed to be in a great hurry and rang off without giving his name. When nobody turned up at five, it occurred to me that the caller intended to find out whether I should be safely in my office at dusk. It was a very useful warning that something might happen. I prepared the way for plenty of free time by telling my clerk that I felt rotten and thought I might be starting a go of flu.

I went home in a curious mood of high hopes and misgivings. It’s no good to deny it. A family man, however contented, does like a bit of excitement if he’s ever been used to any.

About seven my telephone rang and I jumped to it. Cecily, who always answers the telephone (since nine tenths of the calls are for her), gave me a startled smile. She had convinced herself, I think, that the building materials racket was over.

“All set to go,” said Sandorski’s voice. “How are the ants? Here’s a horn for their car!”

And he blew a colossal raspberry that must have nearly wrecked the diaphragm of my telephone.

“Have you a pistol?” he asked.

I replied that I hadn’t. As a matter of fact I had. I didn’t want to part with an old wartime friend, though to retain it was downright illegal. But I did not want to put myself into temptation. I had enough trouble as it was.

I warned Cecily that if anyone called or telephoned she was to say I had gone to bed with a touch of flu and was asleep.

“Darling, don’t forget there are three of us who depend on you,” she said.

I told her I never thought of anything else.

I slipped out of the back door, crossed the meadows and waded the stream. As the crow flies the distance to Blossom’s farm wasn’t more than three miles, but the crow didn’t make Dorset footpaths, and I had to step out smartly to reach the haystacks in an hour.

It was a blustery evening with a few fierce showers and comparative calm between. The weather report was of strong winds over the North Sea, rising at times to gale force. With us it was a good enough night for a clandestine landing, but I didn’t think it would appear so at the point of departure.

After crossing a steep little green range, I sploshed down a muddy cart track and hit the lower road south of Blossom’s house. I hoped that the statistician was there in the rain, taking a census of laborers returning from the village pub. Then I turned off into a dry valley which led up to the back of the shoot. My feet on the turf made no sound. It was very dark, and a solid object could only be distinguished thirty yards away. I knew that I couldn’t be observed or followed.

I arrived at the stacks silently and on the hour. I couldn’t see Sandorski, and he gave me the worst fright of the evening when he spoke from the level of my feet. He was lying on an old tarpaulin, which I had already touched to be sure that tarpaulin it was, and absolutely invisible.

He told me that the beacons had been set up at dusk, just as I had prophesied; they were, he thought, of transpontor type, and each had been easily carried by two men. All this he had seen from the top of a beech in the boundary hedge, where he had been on watch every afternoon and evening. After it was darkish, he had heard the party going back to the upper road. Thereupon he trotted down to the village to telephone me.

“Any plan?” I asked.

“Not yet. What are we up against? Don’t know!”

We took position not far from the southern beacon. About nine we heard their footsteps. They must have moved very quietly as far as the boundary hedge. Then they had to cross a strip of plowland strewn with large flints. I had never discovered a way of walking silently over those flints, nor did they.

So far as we could tell, they crossed the plowland and settled down somewhere on the edge of the grass. Since I knew every foot of the surface and Sandorski did not, I left him in our hiding place and explored, stopping frequently to listen. I spotted them first by the flare of a match. They felt confident enough to smoke. I crawled over the turf till I was within twenty yards of them. They were still a party of four. In the glow of the cigarette ends I felt pretty certain that I recognized Hiart.

Their voices were low, and I could only distinguish a few sentences in the hush between the passing gusts of wind. I should have said the hush was complete, but, when one tried to listen, there were smaller breezes playing through the dead thistle stalks, or the flap of their mackintoshes, or, just as a whisper was giving the clue to previous half-guessed words, the tiny crepitation of insect or field mouse close to my ear. I gathered, at any rate, that the plane was starting from Austria, that it would refuel in

France on the return journey, and that they too thought it wouldn’t come. They were prepared to wait for it again on the following night.

I returned to the general with my news. We sat where we were, and about an hour before midnight someone came to the beacon and presumably switched off the battery. He didn’t go through the gap in the boundary hedge and off to the road, but back to rejoin the rest of his party on the down. Sandorski leaped at the opportunity to get away before them, see what was the number of their car and whether there was anyone waiting in it.

It was too bold, even on so dark a night, for after we passed the gap they weren’t more than a hundred yards behind us. We silently increased our lead and then, finding no car at all at the junction of the track and the upper road, dropped into the ditch and let them pass us. We trailed them at a reasonable distance–at least it seemed reasonable to Sandorski–and discovered that they had left their car half a mile down the road, just up a little metaled track which ran through a patch of woodland. When they drove away, there were still only four men in the car, so we knew that it had been left unguarded. The People’s Union, for all its thousands of innocent enthusiasts, seemed to be a bit short of manpower for a job of this delicacy.

I slept deeply and late, foreseeing that the next night I might have little chance, and at my office pretended to be bravely carrying on in spite of that incipient flu. My clerk was sympathetic. It may seem unnecessarily grand for a plain salesman to boast a clerk–but we had a few big contracts, and I needed someone to sit within reach of the telephone when I was out. The job suited him. He was over sixty, reliable and fatherly. He said that my eyes were altogether too clear and bright, and that I looked like an aunt of his just before she died. It might, I thought, well be so. I’ve seen plenty of men whose eyes were clear and bright just before they died. Only they didn’t know they were going to.

His confounded aunt put ideas into my head. I wrote down for Cecily a short account of what had happened, sealed it up, and took the envelope round to the bank. I didn’t feel the office safe was secure enough.

In the evening I played with the boys, and ate an early supper. I told Cecily that I had to go out, and that I hoped this would be the last night of the investigation. She didn’t know quite what to make of my mood, for I was in good spirits. It seemed to me more and more unlikely that I should ever be in the dock for manslaughter. Anything else that was coming to me I could handle.

Soon after half-past seven I was with Sandorski, tucked into the hedge above the southern beacon. An hour later the party arrived, and stood quite close to us while they checked and switched on the beacon. Pink and Hiart we recognized beyond doubt. The other two were unknown to either of us. They were not as careful as they had been the night before. Growing familiarity with the job, perhaps. And really there was no reason why they should be careful. It was a million to one against anybody being out of doors on the open ground of Blossom’s and the adjoining farm.

The night was clear, with a niggling northwest wind which was damp and cold out of all proportion to its strength. The four men didn’t lie out again on the edge of their airstrip; they retired to the comfortable shelter of the boundary hedge.

It was their distance from the beacons and the top of the down that gave Sandorski his crazy inspiration. He suddenly slapped me on the back.

“Why not?” he asked me in a yell of a whisper. “Why not?”

His tone was all full of irresponsible cavalry tactics. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he suggested chasing Hiart over the downs with a lance. I replied that I’d tell him why not at once, if I knew what he was proposing.

“Why not shift the beacons?”

“Wreck the plane?”

“Hell, no! Welcome it! Reception committee, ha? We ought to have three minutes. Might have much more.”

I protested at the outrageous gamble.

“Gamble? What gamble? They can’t know the plane is coming down in the wrong place till it’s down there.”

“But why? What’s the objective?”

“Muck ‘em up! What else? Sit on our backsides in a bramble bush? Just see him land and take off again? Pah! That’s what Hiart would do. We want to know what or whom they are flying over. Well, go and grab the lot. Can’t do any harm.”

“Oh, can’t it!” I said.

“What? Still thinking of Riemann’s home from home? Good God, man, are you going to put your miserable private affairs before service to your country?”

I never in my life heard such a lousy argument. I was still by no means convinced that I was serving my country, and even less that his wild scheme would benefit anyone but the four men waiting in the boundary hedge. Yet he left me with no possible reply. I didn’t wonder the Poles made him a general. He could only be that or a trooper. All other ranks are supposed to think with their brains.

“Now where shall we make the poor beggar land?” he asked cheerfully, as if it were all settled.

“There’s only one possible place. Where the down continues the other side of the northern hedge. But there are cows there.”

“Well, if he hits one, he hits one. What do you know about radio beacons?”

“Nothing.”

“Stands to reason that if they work in one place, they work in another. Ha? Doesn’t it? And they can be dropped -by parachute and work–I know that. So if we carry ‘em carefully and level ‘em up, we ought to be all right.”

“Suppose they come and look at them again?”

“Well, they didn’t last night, so why should they tonight?”

“Have we time?” I protested as a last effort.

“Not if you stand there,” he hissed, “arguing in bloody whispers all night.”

We lifted the southern beacon and its supports, and made a detour round the landing strip, following the grass track along the edge of the down below which I had sat with Sandorski on the day of our meeting. The lights twinkled in the village below, and the headlights of cars flicked their white sheets over trees and stream. All the time I listened for the plane. Once we both cursed, but it was an air liner on its way to the north.

We set up the beacon in the northern hedge. The supports were admirably fitted for their purpose. Their sharp points bit firmly into the turf of the bank; with two long legs, one short and one slightly shorter, we had the thing straight enough for any practical use.

In the dark kaffir kraal of bramble bushes it wasn’t so easy to find the other beacon, and the time was now half-past nine. We made a lot of impatient noise, but the party sitting in the boundary hedge were too far away to hear us. At last we got it, and fixed it up on the very brink of the valley. Here the steep escarpment swept round to the east, abruptly ending Blossom’s down. We could only give that unknown and unfortunate pilot something under four hundred yards, instead of the five to six hundred that the proper reception committee had allowed. After we got the beacon in position, I paced out the distance and shifted a couple of sleepy cows. There were no other obstacles so long as the pilot stayed bang on his line and could stop before he plunged into the valley.