Текст книги "A Rough Shoot "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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We then had time to sit down and work out the odds. If the plane landed according to the signals from the beacons, and if it didn’t go over the edge–two very bigifs– we had rather more than the three minutes which Peter Sandorski had demanded. The four men in the boundary hedge would come up to the level of their airstrip when they expected or heard the plane, but even there they would be a quarter of a mile from us, plus the distance that the plane traveled. When the pilot overshot their strip, they would think he meant to turn and come back, so that they wouldn’t begin to run up until he actually landed. Sandorski’s plan began to look less like a nightmare.

A little after ten the plane circled once, and came in over the hedge like a great silent owl. The pilot revved up as he touched, and taxied forward till his wing was nearly over the beacon. He saw or sensed the appalling drop in front of him, lurched round, switched on his light and spent an intolerable time maneuvering into a position where there wasn’t a cow or a thorn bush or sudden death in front of him.

As soon as his wheels came to rest, he put out his light. I suppose he had been instructed not to use it, and to trust to the beacon signals. We hammered excitedly on the door. Sandorski left it to me to do the talking in case his voice should be recognized. I sounded, he said, just like any other blasted Englishman. The rest of him was safely unrecognizable. In the dark he was a shapeless mass of sweaters and windbreakers, and his small head was extinguished between cap and muffler.

The door was opened from within, and a man peered doubtfully out into the night.

“Quick!” I shouted. “We haven’t a moment. Police on the way! Jump, man!”

He dropped to the ground, carrying a small suitcase with him.

“Anything else?”

“It is all,” the stranger answered.

The pilot stuck his head out.

”Here!” he protested. “Call this a landing strip? Not again! I’m not a–”

“Get out of here, you fool!” I yelled hysterically. “You’ll be arrested in a minute. Get out!”

“What’s ahead?”

“Three hundred yards and then a hedge. Jump it if you can’t fly it.”

“Cripes!” he said. “I’ll bring a horse next time.”

We had created a fine atmosphere of alarm and despondency. The plane roared and began to move. The pilot flooded the turf with light again, and revealed the real reception committee running towards us less than a hundred yards away. With the engine ticking over, it had been impossible for us to hear their movements.

He took no risk of being stopped. I wonder he didn’t kill the lot of them. But he cleared the hedge. While we ran I heard the steady drone of the plane in its safe and lonely world, and envied him.

We took the nearest way, straight down the slope. That for the moment increased our lead. I seized the passenger’s suitcase and got rid of it into a thick holly which I knew I could find again even in the dark. Relieved of that, he ran like a man with a guilty conscience.

We swerved back, following the contour line below the copse where my innocent statistician had sat and counted traffic, and began to pound up the slope at an angle. This was stumbling, not running; and our pursuers drew up into close touch. They couldn’t see us–or only as occasional bulks against the sky–but they couldn’t fail to hear us.

They had had time to think and began to call:

“Lex! Lex!”

“That vos the voice of Peenk,” said the passenger in a firm Central European accent, and half stopping.

I shoved him on.

“Run, Lex! Pink’s the police informer. I’m getting you to Heyne-Hassingham.”

Thank the Lord he was high up in the party! That name seemed to be immediate proof of my bona fides. He crashed along the side of that hill like a startled heifer, through bush and over rabbit hole. We increased our lead a bit, and I took a chance on being where I thought I was. I pulled them round behind a thorn brake, through a gap in the furze and down onto the ground. As we dropped flat on the turf, Lex gave a muffled cry of pain.

“Damn these thorns!” hissed Sandorski.

He dug me in the ribs and held out, behind our friend’s back, a little syringe with which he had just jabbed him in the thigh.

The hunt passed us, then checked and turned back. They knew, as soon as they stopped to listen, that we must have gone to ground on the hillside. In the stillness of the night you could hear a man charging across country half a mile away. If only we could have reached the springy turf of the green track above us, we could have run–or jumped or danced, for that matter–without a sound.

They closed in, and flashed torches quickly on and off. They were wise not to spoil their night sight, and it may be, too, that they feared we were armed and desperate. All they could see was a formless black mass of thorn and furze, forbidding search. The twisting track into the heart of it, worn down by the persistent feet of little animals and an occasional sheep, was clear enough from where we lay, but indistinguishable from outside. Two of them were above us and two below us. They made a halfhearted attempt to beat the patch, but the furze was stiff and centuries old; we might have been surrounded by a lion-proof thorn fence.

It was as well that Sandorski’s syringe had done its work, for they started to ask Lex what the devil he thought he was doing. They couldn’t say very much, for they didn’t know who was with him or why the plane had come down in the wrong place or why it had immediately and frantically taken off again. Indeed they couldn’t be certain that Lex had ever got out of the plane at all–and from their point of view we might be three unknown enemies, or Lex and two. Sandorski’s cavalry tactics had landed us in the most God-awful defenseless position, but at least they had bewitched the opposing force into a nightmare world where nothing made sense.

Hiart’s querulous voice, above us, said:

“For heaven’s sake, don’t go throwing names about!”

Pink, from below us and in a furious temper, told him to beggar off home to his bleeding nanny.

All the same, it wasn’t funny. True, they couldn’t see us till they stepped on us, but they had only to wait till daylight or till we grew impatient.

We heard somebody moving round our patch of cover and giving orders in whispers. I think it was Hiart, for their next move showed a certain subtlety. They shifted noisily about until we hadn’t the faintest notion where any single one of them was, and then preserved the most absolute, disciplined silence.

We were out of the wind on that slope, and there wasn’t a sound. A rare car rushed along the road in the valley beneath. A sheep coughed on the lower ground by the stream. This went on for half an hour. At least I found it to be only half an hour when I looked at my watch. I thought it must be nearly dawn. Strain on the nerves has no time.

Then Lex began to thrash about in his dreamland, and somebody above us closed in towards the sound. I hung onto Lex’s legs and Sandorski lay across his chest and arms. Pink must have been near enough to hear Lex’s heavy breathing. He shot in our general direction, and scored a bull. He hit the rectangle between Sandorski’s legs, Lex’s body and my arms. It wasn’t his fault that there was nothing but turf in it.

The shot was the breaking point for somebody else who had been frozen and terrified like ourselves. A roe deer, away to our left in a patch of thick stuff where one of us easily might have been but was not, broke cover and crashed away. Sandorski, instantaneously appreciating what the enemy would think, broke cover too and went after it, drawing off two of the watchers; they might, if he had given them a moment to think, have spotted the first disturbance as that of an animal, but they couldn’t distinguish the noises–since one was followed immediately by another –and could only assume that two of us had gone.

Right! Make it a third, I thought! And down the hill I went–after, of course, the interval of some seconds which I needed to catch up with Sandorski’s brilliance. I drew off the other two sentries, one of whom was Pink. His naval language was unmistakable. I led them up again to the turf, and there, where I could run silently, easily lost them.

I listened. I could hear Pink and his companion blundering through a bit of heavy plowland that lay between me and the airstrip. I guessed that he had given up the pursuit as hopeless–which it was–and was returning to the party’s rendezvous under the boundary hedge.

There was no knowing what Sandorski would do, for we had not arranged any rendezvous at all. Whether he heard my escape or not, however, it wasn’t likely he would lose touch for long with the unconscious Lex. Meanwhile the position was chaotic. Scattered over half a square mile of down and plow and thicket were Sandorski and myself and the disorganized reception committee, none of us knowing where the others were, and all anxious to find out. Additional complications were Lex snoring in the bushes and his bag in the holly tree.

Lex gave a heave and a rumble. In the night silence which had now become more absolute and hostile than ever, that noise seemed as outrageous a signal as any flashing light. I decided to shift him at once, while I could be sure that my own section of empty space was really empty. I carried him down the hill and left him in the open, where his odd noises would sound like those of the sheep, memorizing his position as well as I could without any very definite landmarks to go by.

I settled down on the edge of the turf track above our temporary hiding place. After a bit, Hiart, tall enough to recognize, came flitting cautiously over the grass with one of his men. They stopped and listened at the right spot, gave it up and vanished northwards along the track.

Where were they going? Well, if Hiart had the intelligence Sandorski attributed to him–and I was immensely impressed by his finding, in a world that all looked alike, the exact patch where we had been–then he would guess that the only explanation of the aircraft coming down in the wrong place and being expected there by unknown persons must be that the beacons had been moved. Having checked that, he would try to find them–for they were evidence that must at all costs be removed–and carry them off to his car. It wouldn’t take him long to discover the one in the open on the edge of the slope, and then the tracks of the landing wheels would lead him somewhere near the other in the hedge.

I hoped that Sandorski might be close behind Hiart, but he was not. I waited and waited, feeling all the time that we might be within a few yards of each other, and each afraid to break the silence. I needn’t have worried. When Sandorski did come, it was boldly down the track, and singing in a low, but not nearly low enough voice some preposterous chorus:

One day in October I wasn’t so sober.

“For the Lord’s sake!” I protested. “English folk song,” he answered. “Learned it from my governess. They’re miles away and busy. Have a cigarette!”

“Where are they?”

“Looking for the beacons, all four of them.”

“That won’t take them long.”

“Won’t it, ha? One is halfway down the hill, and the other on its side under a pile of cabbage.”

“Kale.”

“Well, whatever damned kraut you feed to cows in this country. Next thing, Colonel, my lad, is to restore your temper.”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Our friend under the daisies. Dig him up, and you’re a free man.”

Even in the midst of this excitement I wasn’t very ready to give away the place. So long as I kept my precious secret to myself, it was secure.

“You bloody fool!” he said. “Now’s your chance to do what you ought to have done the first time. Burn their car and burn him in it. They’ll think the corpse is Lex. That’ll keep Hiart quiet! That’ll make him stay at home. Suspicion? Nonsense! Why you? Life’s wide open to inspection. Decent bourgeois selling tombstones. No connection whatever with Poles and such. Continent isolated, ha?”

It did look, I must admit, as if I were on to a good thing. I led Sandorski to the rabbit warren. It was a little close to the hedge where the beacon lay under its pile of kale, but Hiart’s party were at the far end of the down still searching for the other.

At the bottom of the pit we could safely use a torch. We dug him out with our hands, and I left him to Sandorski for I didn’t want to look. I smoothed back the earth and arranged the fallen thorn in its old position.

Sandorski flashed his light on what had been the face. It didn’t tell him anything but the common fate of man. He looked further, and found a tattoo mark on the right arm and a locket or identity disk on a light chain round the neck. He took it and put it in his pocket.

“So that is the end of Riemann,” he said.

It was he who had the courage to deal with the corpse, he who was glad to see the man dead. Yet there was a sob in his voice.

“What had he done?” I asked.

“Despaired. Wanted a short cut and thought we were too patient. Went over to these people and broke open my organization, for I had trusted him. Not for money and not for country, but just because he thought they were the saviors of the future. Taine, I find myself against every kind of idealism.”

It was a terrible confession to cry out, but, in this world of passionately sincere political creeds, it was true. He was in opposition to them all. Yet he had an ideal, and it was Christendom, the holy and forgotten unity of Europe. Only in such a Europe, where politics were seen to be a mere expedient compared to the beauty of the common heritage, could his people live.

He took out a knife and removed all traces of lead pellets from the body. I could see none, but we had to expect the microscopes of a police laboratory. Then he pulled the leg of the beacon from Riemann’s heart, and buried it again.

“Hang onto his heels,” he said.

We trotted along the boundary hedge to the gap, and when we reached the upper road followed it down to the patch of woodland where they had left their car the previous night. We took to the ditch once when the headlights of a lorry, climbing the hill, swept and wavered through the sky. Otherwise we didn’t see a sign of man.

The car was again unguarded. Hiart must have been very nervous about it, but he had no reason to suppose we knew where it was. And in any case he couldn’t spare a man.

We wrenched off the main petrol lead, bent it and soaked Riemann and the floor mats. Then we put him in the driving seat, and Sandorski threw a lighted cigarette into the pool of petrol beneath the car. The result was spectacular. We were only just far enough away.

We cleared out, back along the hard road where our footprints wouldn’t show, then over a wire fence onto firm grass and so across country to Blossom’s land, which we hit near his hilltop barn. The glare lit up our eastern horizon. I don’t know what the party at the northern end of the down did when they saw it. I would have liked to hear Pink’s remarks to Hiart on the subject of wasting time over useless precautions.

The suitcase was recovered without difficulty. Lex, however, was not. I could have sworn that I knew where I put him! but every time I went confidently up to him, he either got up and turned out to be a sheep, or lay still and was a patch of dead weeds. There was no time to lose, for we had to be out of the neighborhood before police got busy on the down and the two roads–and very busy they would be.

“We’ll have to leave him,” I insisted at last. “What does he know?”

“Enough to recognize us both, and swear to anything Heyne-Hassingham tells him.”

Well, we found him in the end. The silly blighter had partly recovered from the drug, walked a hundred yards or so, and tumbled down to sleep again by the stream. He came round when we lifted his slack body and shook it.

“It’s all right,” I encouraged him. “You’re out of trouble now, you know.” .

He replied vaguely that he was very tired. Even with one of us on each side of him, he was too comatose to walk. He kept on grabbing at his bag and mumbling about his papers.

“How soon can you get your car?” Sandorski asked.

“Not enough time. The road may be watched in half an hour. Have you got any more in the bottle?”

He had another ampoule. Lex couldn’t help seeing him bring out the syringe. He stuttered “No! No!” in a cracked, terrified voice, but his will was completely paralyzed. He even held out his arm.

Then began a melancholy procession across the road and up into the hills on the opposite side. I led the way, holding his ankles, and Sandorski followed with his shoulders. We tied his case onto his stomach. It was the only way to carry it.

I had determined to go to my house. I might have found a better refuge–at any rate, for long enough to examine Lex and look at his papers–but it was essential I should go home. I had at once to confess the whole truth to Cecily, or leave the most horrid doubts and worries in her mind as soon as she heard–and, with the morning milk, she would–of the burned car and its unrecognizable driver. I needed the general to back up my story. My future was at stake in a very different way to that which I had feared for the last three weeks.

It was close on dawn when we entered my back gate. I put Sandorski and Lex in the shed at the bottom of the garden, with some brandy and a kerosene stove. Lex had a luxurious overcoat; I hoped that he also had a tough constitution. It had been a cold night for sleeping in the open.

Then I went upstairs and woke Cecily. I pulled the curtains and turned on her bedside light and told her I needed her help and patience.

She started up, with that glow upon her of a woman who loves and is loved. It can’t be analyzed. I remember parading an opinion in bachelor days that the test of a girl’s beauty was what she looked like when she woke up. A truth, but a shallow truth. The real test is what you think she looks like.

I said that I had a long story to tell her, and that I wanted hot food and blankets for two men in the shed.

“But why the shed?” she asked.

“Until the children go to school. They might talk.”

“Nothing wakes the children,” she smiled. “They will be fast asleep for another hour. Why not the spare bedroom?

“Well, it’s just possible that the house might be searched. I don’t for a moment think it will be.”

“Seriously searched?”

“No. But just a look-round on some excuse.”

“Put them in the roof space under the gable. It’s warm up there. And if they don’t move about, but stay over our room–”

“I’m not going to keep them more than a day,” I said.

“You may have to, darling,” she replied, as if she were perfectly accustomed to such a problem.

I never dreamed she could meet the crisis so calmly. She had all the imaginative fears of a mother of young children. Nightmare after nightmare must have been already gathering under the loyalty which was natural to her and the discipline she imposed on herself.

We had to hurry. My back garden was hidden from the road, but in daylight it was in full view of the low line of the hills.

Sandorski laid Lex down inside the door as unaffectedly as if he had been carrying a parcel.

“Madame,” he said. “I am proud to have met the husband of such a wife.

He kissed her hand, and she managed the receiving end like a Grand Duchess. She’d had it kissed innumerable times before, but never in that superb manner.

I put a ladder against the trap door in the roof, and we hauled Lex up by a rope under his armpits. A mattress, blankets and a hot-water bottle followed. How the children slept through it I can’t imagine, but they did.

Meanwhile Cecily was getting tea and eggs ready in the kitchen–not an easy task in the semidarkness. The lighting of her bedside lamp would pass, but when I had put it out I lit no others. Any evidence of early activity in the house had to be avoided.

In the gray and uncomfortable light of the dining room I began my story very irresolutely, and made a thorough mess of it. I didn’t know how far Sandorski would like me to talk of his business, and of course I felt ashamed of that light-hearted shot at Riemann’s expansive target.

“Colonel, my lad, tell her everything,” Sandorski insisted. “Infantry–that’s what you are all through! Won’t take a gamble. Where would you be now if I hadn’t driven your partridges for you, ha?”

“Fast asleep in bed,” I said.

“Yes–with a damn bad conscience. And this lovely golden madonna of yours wondering what the devil had given you indigestion for the last fortnight. You should be grateful to me.”

“I am,” said Cecily.

“If you can still tell me that this evening, Mrs. Taine, I will believe in marriage.”

“But you do.”

She gave him a long look, the meaning of which I did not appreciate until she suddenly laid her hand on his.

“My children were the age of yours,” he said. “They too slept well.”

He put his head in his hands. It had been a hard night.

“Go on,” Cecily ordered me quietly.

She was right. My story gave him time to recover. The gray day grew reluctantly. It was a winter dawn, not autumn.

When I had finished, Cecily looked very drawn and stern. She felt strongly that running about the downs with Polish generals in the middle of the night was not one of the duties of the father of a family. I had implied as much ten times over, and pointed out that there was no phase of the action at which I could possibly have extricated myself. I don’t think she agreed. There had, perhaps, been a little too must gusto in my account of the night’s doings, and not enough repentance.

However, she turned on Sandorski.

“If you are going to stay here, General” she said, “you must promise me one thing.”

“Anything,” he answered gallantly.

“You must promise me that no harm shall come to the man you brought with you.”

“My word of honor that no harm shall come to him under your roof,” he replied.

“I didn’t say anything about my roof. He’s had enough, and you are not to do him any harm at all, now or afterwards.”

“The devil! I don’t even know what he’s been up to.”

“Nor do I. Or care.”

“But, Mrs. Taine, you wouldn’t prevent me from sitting on his head if the police were below?”

“I didn’t mean that at all, and you know it,” she answered violently.

Sandorski thought for a few seconds. He took his word of honor so seriously that he had to draw up a sort of mental contract.

“I promise,” he said, “that he shall not be killed or tortured or handed over to anyone but the British police by me or by my order. Will that do?”

“Yes,” she said, and added illogically: “But I never even thought of such beastly things.”

After breakfast Cecily went to the roof with the general and took Lex’s* pulse and temperature. He wasn’t cold or shivering, and there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. Sandorski said he ought to sleep for a few hours more. His first injection had been a stab in the dark. The second was carefully placed.

When the general had been settled in the loft with his patient, I gave him a rope for his future movements, took down the ladder, washed it and put it away. Then I went to bed, pretending the touch of flu that I had warned my clerk I was going to have, and Cecily woke the children.

Before she gave them breakfast, she ran races with them– to get them warm, she said–through the back gate and across the meadow. That effectively destroyed the heavy tracks of Sandorski and myself. Then she carefully examined the shed at the bottom of the garden and removed all traces of occupation.

I didn’t expect the police till the evening at earliest. I thought it would take them some time to make the connection between Blossom’s land and the burned car. But when I was about to get up and start the examination of Lex’s suitcase with Sandorski our local constable and his inspector called–in the hope of catching me before I left for the office. Cecily received them downstairs. She was just taking the children to school. The inspector had more low cunning than I ever put to his credit. He chatted with the boys, and quickly found out that Daddy hadn’t felt very well the night before and was still in bed. Cecily told me afterwards that the little innocents were so sorry for me and so convincing that she almost believed in my illness herself.

The two policemen came up to my room, apologizing profusely. They didn’t tell me what had happened. They said that another abandoned vehicle had been found on the upper road. I started to complain, with the querulousness of an invalid, that I had locked my garage at the usual hour and that I didn’t see why I should be bothered for parking without lights if somebody pinched my car.

“Oh, it’s not that, sir!” the inspector laughed. “Now, we understand from Mr. Blossom that you have rented the shooting over his land. Have you ever noticed anything peculiar up there?”

“I haven’t. But, good Lord, Blossom is there all the time! He could tell you better than I.”

“He sent us to you, Mr. Taine. He was always busy, he said, but you had your eyes open.”

Then, ruling me, I think, off his list of possible suspects, he came clean. He told me that a burned car had been found with the body of an unknown male in it, that the police had had a report of the light of an aircraft being seen on Blossom’s down, and that they had searched the down at first light and seen tracks of landing wheels. Had I ever noticed anything which might Lead Me to Believe … “

Well, no, I hadn’t.

“Are you ever up there at night, Mr. Taine?”

“No, of course not,” I answered rather too sharply.

“Have you ever seen any sign of poachers?”

I disliked that line of questioning, but what he was after was to get at the names of possible poachers who might have been out at night, and might have noticed something. At last they went away, leaving me gently sweating under my dressing gown. It must be a nuisance for the police that almost every man feels slightly guilty in their presence. If that weren’t so, it would be much easier for them to pick out the truly guilty.

It was convenient, however, to have the police out or the way at so early an hour. I rapped on the trap door with a fishing rod as a signal for Sandorski to lower his rope and come down. He brought with him Lex’s keys. We opened his suitcase.

It was of expensive leather, beautifully fitted inside, and contained everything the painfully well-dressed man would require for the night–silk pyjamas, silk dressing gown, liver salts in a silver-topped bottle, monogrammed hair brushes and a deliberately masculine smell. At the bottom, under a change of tasty socks and underclothing, was a briefcase.

It was a case of thin, imitation black leather, untidily stuffed with papers. The lock, however, was good–not at all the bit of cheap metal which can be bent out with a wrench of the fingers. I didn’t like that case; it seemed to me incongruous. I don’t claim any instinct, or any particular powers of observation; but I do believe that you can’t live through five years of very active service without developing a strong sense of self-preservation. The night’s work had put me back in the old mood of treating unknown objects, whether a pin-up picture, a water-closet plug or a bottle of wine, with extreme care. I don’t know how many times I have lectured troops on not whooping with joy every time they came across attractive little surprises.

Sandorski chose a key, but it didn’t fit. He was turning the key ring for another, when I picked up the briefcase and felt it.

“Do you really think this was what they hired a plane for?” I asked.

“Eh? Of course!”

He stretched out his hand for the case, but I didn’t offer it.

“Why couldn’t they have needed a plane just for Lex?”

“For Lex? They could get him in with a lot less trouble. Documents–these and whatever comes after and the replies–that’s what they need an air service for.”

I wanted to be assured that the beastly case was really important. I was not at all eager to prove what I suspected unless it had to be done.

“All right,” I said. “But this time it’s going to be infantry tactics.”

I went into the bathroom (taking the case with me, for I wasn’t going to trust the impetuous Sandorski alone with it) and came back with a new razor blade. I held the top of the case firmly, and cut the seam which fastened the expanding pleats at the bottom to the stiffer side. The case was filled with loose paper, which I pulled out and Sandorski preserved.

Meanwhile I could feel under my left hand a hard cylinder, apparently attached to the side of the case. That confirmed my suspicion that there was a device of some sort connected to the lock–almost certainly a simple incendiary. I would have liked to take the whole thing out into the garden, but appearance in the garden was taboo. And anyway the thing hypnotized me into avoiding all movement. So I started to worry about the new bedroom carpet, which was a convenient and handy object for worry.

When I had cleared the paper, I looked inside. The cylinder was an ordinary cardboard roll–the sort that one uses as a container for maps or blueprints. It was tied over the open ends with tape and sealed with a lead seal. Fingers rather than eyes found a wire running through the tape into the center of the cylinder and attached to the latch of the case. It looked as if slipping the catch or removing the roll would pull the wire.

I tried to remember, among all the debris of long forgotten courses on everything from control of flies to detection of wooden mines (the answer in both cases being that you couldn’t), what I had learned about all the dirty tricks of sappers. There was something about a spring which released a plunger which broke a vessel of sulphuric acid which did pretty well anything you wanted it to do.

Well, if the pulling of the catch pulled the wire–as it obviously did–and released the plunger, there must be some way by which Lex could prevent it happening. I wished I had done a course on bomb disposal. I wished I had been in the garden. I wished above all that I had the power to take my left hand off the top of the case and that I wouldn’t press so hard. I wished that we hadn’t bought a new bedroom carpet.