Текст книги "A Rough Shoot "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 8 страниц)

As we crossed the bridge over the lines, a train came in from the west. There was another, apparently just about to start, going to Southampton. This was a gift, and singly and unobtrusively we entered it. That, we reckoned, would waste some more of the Wiltshire Constabulary’s time.

The cross-country train rumbled down to the coast untroubled, its few passengers gay or snoring. We had a compartment to ourselves. Lex, once more wrapped in his overcoat, dozed. Sandorski and I kept a careful lookout as the train stopped at the dim-lit country stations. None showed any curiosity about us. There was nothing we could have done if they had.

We were under no illusions. The police would surely have taken an interest in three tickets to London, booked just at the critical time, and three vaguely seen men, two of whom were of the right build. When they hadn’t found us on the London train, it seemed likely that they would put a routine check on Southampton station. If we weren’t there either, then we must be still in Salisbury. And so Sandorski took another of his cavalry decisions.

When the train stopped about a third of a mile outside Southampton Central, he gave a quick look up and down the line, and ordered us out.

As soon as I had lowered Lex to the ground, I felt that Sandorski had merely multiplied our chances of being caught. But he did nothing by halves. He dived between the wheels and lay flat on the permanent way, and we had to follow him. It was so swift and sensible, provided you could forget–as I could not–the chance of the train starting while one of us was wriggling over the rails.

The train pulled out over our heads, leaving Sandorski sputtering with indignant rage and all the monosyllables that his governess had taught him. He had been a little close to the outflow of the lavatory.

It wasn’t a promising stretch of line. On both sides of it were difficult fences and beyond them wide deserts of waste ground. The only cover was a line of coal trucks in a siding. A mile away were the flood-lit funnels of the liners. I had a lovely daydream of being on board with Cecily and the children. It was a depressing spot, that blank bit of railway.

“You’ve done it this time,” I said. “Easier to make New York than London.”

“We’ll take a boat train. Why not?” he answered cheerfully.

“Because there aren’t any at this time of night.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that?”–he patted the truck against which we were leaning. “It must go somewhere sometime.”

“But we don’t know where, and Lex would be frozen to death.”

“Then, Colonel, my lad, we’ll stop a train!”

“How?”

“Red light. Or do they use green lights in England? Hell! Drive on the left of the road, don’t you?”

“Suppose there’s an accident?”

“Nonsense! Why should there be? Eh, Lex?”

“Accident to other people, not so?” asked Lex hopefully.

“You’ll be in it too, my boy,” said Sandorski. “Got a bit of red paper, Colonel?”

“Is it Christmas?”

“Infantryman–ha? No hole in the ground–no morale, ha? Where’s that torch of yours?”

I stopped sulking, and began to think. If he stopped a train, there would be a determined search for the culprit, and the police might put two and two together.

“You always do the right thing,” I said, “and then go plumb crazy when it works. Look here, if we went to Southampton by train, that’s the only train we could have taken. Right! We weren’t on it, so the cops go home to bed. If we’re cautious we can use the station.”

The line was open and bare of possible cover. There was little chance of avoiding any railwaymen who might choose to walk along it at the same time as ourselves, or of bluffing them into believing that we had a right to be where we were. Assuming that the police had been chatting with stationmaster and staff, anyone answering the descriptions of Sandorski and myself would be under lively suspicion. No, it was absolutely essential to reach the station unnoticed. If we could, and if we found a place to wait for a London train, we should be clear of pursuit at last.

I went up the line to explore, leaving Lex and the general under cover of the coal trucks. My excuse was that I knew more of my own railways than Sandorski; but in fact I felt that his mood was too inspired for him to be let loose. Left to himself, he might easily have walked into the station-master’s office and ordered a special train. I don’t say he wouldn’t have got it, but at this crisis of our fortunes I was all for a hole-in-the-ground policy.

Quarter of a mile up the line was a signal box blazing with light, and beyond that the white gleam of the station and the dots of red and emerald on the tracks. I trotted from sleeper to sleeper, ready to drop flat at any moment, until I was under the wall of the box. That was the end of the advance. I might perhaps have tried to stalk the station if I had had only myself to consider, but there was no hope of getting the lumbering, overcoated Lex past the box and all the lights and onto the bare platform without some official shouting at us.

Even so I was confident that on a dark night, with all industry and transport–outside the station, that is–tucked up in bed or represented only by sleepy watchmen, it would be easy enough to find another route and to remain invisible. The little gods of luck, however–whom I may have offended by ascribing too much of our success to good management–were determined to show me to whom the gratitude was really due.

I went back down the line and started to climb the fence into the waste ground between railway and docks. The fence was only of split paling, but I got my trousers caught on the points. While I was trying to extricate myself, a locomotive passed, clanking lightheartedly home. The driver shouted something, and the fireman heaved a lump of coal–more, I think, by way of a cheerfully disapproving gesture than with any intent of hitting the target; indeed he might have tried for a month of journeys to score a bull and failed. The lump caught me on the back of the neck. The seat of my pants and the paling were smartly separated. Until I picked myself up I thought it was the locomotive itself which had hit me.

After crossing the waste ground and another fence I came out onto a road. It passed over the railway by a bridge, on each side of which were the approaches to the up and down platforms, spacious, well-lit and empty but for a solitary taxi. There were two massive cops outside the entrance to the up booking-office; the solidity of their overcoats made them look like a sculptor’s functional decoration for the concrete buildings. While I watched them,

they moved off. To us it didn’t much matter whether they stayed or not. The railwaymen, mildly busy on the platforms, had certainly been warned to keep an eye open for fugitive murderers.

I leaned over the parapet of the bridge. The tracks and the roofs over the platforms were immediately below me. The roofs were accessible, easily accessible, and couldn’t be seen from ground level. Was there any hope of a route and a refuge at the end of it? I saw several fantastic answers, and one that might be practical. In a bay alongside the down platform was a big, empty restaurant-car. If we could reach it, we could wait as long as we liked behind it or under it. The back of the car was close up against the wall of the station buildings, and in deep shadow.

Before I committed Lex and Sandorski, I decided to reconnoiter the route. The road appeared to be empty. I climbed onto the parapet, and let myself silently down to the roof of the platform, which was only some six feet below. I had just started to crawl cautiously along the roof, when a voice from the parapet called:

” ‘Ere you! Wotcher doin’ of?”

I shall never know how he managed to interrupt me. I think he must have been riding a bicycle without a light, or else had been watching me for some time from the shadows, as fascinated as any curious dog.

What to do? Take him into my confidence? Bluff? Climb back to the road and knock him out? I remember that all these alternatives went through my head, but I cannot have had time to formulate even mental words. How is it possible to think, I wonder, without the use of at least a few key-words in the brain? And yet, in an emergency, it is.

“Only getting a spot of free travel, mate,” I said.

“Doin’ the railways company, eh?” he asked with an aggressive sense of duty.

“It ain’t the company any longer,” I replied indignantly. “It’s the state.”

He thought that over.

“Ah, so it is,” he said. “Well, good night!”

He removed his head, and vanished as silently as he had appeared.

After all this interference by the citizenry, my nerves were shattered. I crawled along that roof, trying hard to persuade myself that it was safer than any other place I had been in for the last six hours–which, oddly enough, and at a distance of twenty feet from the bridge, was true. When I came abreast of the rear end of the restaurant-car, I saw that there would be no difficulty in dropping on to its roof, so long as feet didn’t slip on its sloping edge. There was a risk, of course, that the lower half of anyone walking along the top of the car would be noticed from the platform, but it had to be taken.

I returned to the bridge, crossed the road and the fence beyond, and disappeared into the waste ground. Lex and Sandorski were waiting where I had left them in the darkness of the coal trucks. The general didn’t much care for my route when I explained it, and asked whether I thought that Lex was a bloody circus performer. Lex, however, had cheered up a little. He insisted that if all he had to do was drop, the law of gravity would take care of him. It certainly would. What worried us was where he would land and how much noise he would make.

We passed Lex over the fence, and made a wide circuit away from the railway so that our clumsy progress wouldn’t be heard by anyone on the line. That journey was a violent strain on patience. The darkness was absolute–probably because there were so many lights in the distance to catch our eyes–and the surface was abominable. Holes, bricks, strands of wire, rusty cans and drums, all camouflaged by tall dead weeds, tripped us while we supported the stumbling Lex. It seemed all of a mile before we came to the road.

I went first to show them where to cross the parapet of the bridge. A minute afterwards Lex sprawled over the edge into sight, with the general hanging onto his hands. I grabbed and landed him, and Sandorski followed. Once Lex had got his breath back, it seemed the right moment to stimulate him; so we had a stiff tot of rum all round.

Our crawl in single file along the roof was easy enough. We halted above the black whale-back of the restaurant car. I asked Lex if he thought that–with help–he could drop to it and keep his footing, and then quickly climb down to the couplings by the rungs at the rear of the car.

The rum worked.

“I have militär training,” he said proudly.We couldn’t let him make an enthusiastic job of it then and there, because we did not know what was going on beneath us. The platform might be empty, or there might be a whole group of railwaymen discussing the next day’s football. I leaned over the edge of the concrete while Sandorski sat on my legs. With the top half of my body upside down, I surveyed the station. On our own platform no one was in sight; on the far platform there was some activity around the baggage office–not very strenuous, but sufficient to keep eyes from straying where they had no business.

“All clear for you, General,” I reported, wriggling back to the horizontal.

He dropped onto the roof of the car, and was off it again with first bounce. He could now keep watch on the platforms for us, and signal to me from the narrow space between the back of the car and the buffers at the end of the bay.

When he beckoned, I too dropped and told Lex to follow. Strength or nerve failed him at the last moment, and he stuck with his chest on the edge of the concrete and his legs kicking wildly in air–just where I couldn’t grab them without risk of falling off the top of the car myself. At that moment a porter chose to walk, whistling, round the corner of the station buildings. I caught Lex’s legs as they lashed back, and prayed that he wouldn’t let go his hold on the roof and that the porter wouldn’t look up. For long seconds we formed a leaning, living bridge between restaurant-car and roof until it was safe for me to whisper to him what to do and where to put his feet.

We dived under the van with, at last, no interested public but the station cat. She seemed to think that she could learn a thing or two from our movements, or perhaps considered us as promising kittens and was showing us how an experienced adult would have done the job. At any rate, she put up such a dance of misplaced enthusiasm between station roof and car and buffers that the porter at the far end of the platform was interested and came back and started to call for puss. Thank God cats don’t bark!

We didn’t have a long wait. The second train in was for London–one of those slow and weightily important trains, usually empty, which stop everywhere to pick up the mails. I poked up a very cautious head. The platform was sparsely populated by porters and post-office employees, and there was no convenient crowd of passengers alighting or boarding the train; it couldn’t have been worse. And then a light engine came along, banged into the restaurant-car, was coupled on, and prepared to draw our cover from over our heads.

It was a moment of hopeless, helpless disappointment. We stood up in my lookout post–between the back of the van and the buffers–and waited to be revealed in all our guilty nakedness to the shunter and assistant stationmaster as soon as the dining car drew out. I don’t know who first saw the way of escape. Even Lex didn’t miss it, for he was trying to scramble up before I shoved him from behind. On the far side of the bay was a ledge, hardly wide enough to be called a platform. We had only to walk along that as the car pulled out, and nobody–provided neither driver nor fireman looked to their right–could see us.

It worked. We trotted along by the flank of that friendly restaurant car, and when we were clear of the bay we saw salvation. There was a goods train standing on the far side of the London train, which we couldn’t get a glimpse of from where we had been. We had only to walk up the permanent way between the two trains and get in from the wrong side.

The doors were already shut, and the night mail might start at any moment. We were weary of precautions. We crossed the rails in a bunch. I don’t know if anyone saw us. If he did, he must have been too tired to bother with trespassing passengers. Once between the two trains, the rest was simple. We settled Lex in a steaming hot empty compartment, put his overcoat under his head, and went into another ourselves to breathe freely. Two minutes later the train left.

“Now,” said Sandorski, “where’s that needle and thread?”

Lex by this time had complete trust in us, and was convinced that the life we had led him for the last twenty-four hours was all for his own good. Every one of our actions was consistent with a desperate attempt to pass him through a cordon of police and private enemies, and deliver him to Heyne-Hassingham. Of course–for that was just what we were trying to do. He no longer worried about his briefcase; in any event he could be sure it hadn’t been tampered with, since it had not gone up in a burst of flame.

Sandorski undid our precious brown paper parcel. The bottom of the briefcase, relieved of string, gaped. The stuffing of paper fell out.

“Can you ever make a job of it?” I asked.

“Must,” he answered. “And I made my own shoes in prison camp. How long have I got?”

“Well, expresses take an hour and a half. We can safely add another hour for this train.”

I think I never admired him so much as during that journey. I had no idea that he could be so meticulous. Every stitch that I had cut was lifted out, and with infinite care he drove his needle through the same holes. First he sewed the cardboard roll back to the inner side of the bag, leaving slack the wire between the latch and the incendiary, so that even when the device was set it wouldn’t go off. Then he put back the loose paper and stitched up the seam. The only thing he could not restore exactly as we found it was the sealed tape that ran the length of the roll and round the two ends. We stuck the cut edges of the tape to the cardboard, and hoped that Heyne-Hassingham, in his general state of agitation, wouldn’t notice. The trigger wire of the incendiary still ran through the tape, so it was pretty certain he would cut, withdraw his documents and never look at roll or tape again.

Lex had not seen his briefcase at all since he packed. He had only seen the parcel, which was beginning to look disreputable. We brushed the drying mud from our clothes, remixed it and smeared it artistically here and there over the case to hide the newness of the thread. Then we wrapped up the parcel again, and soaked the lower end in mud and water. When Lex handled it, the paper would certainly disintegrate and the dirt of the case would need no explanation.

While Sandorski was working on his long task I stood in the corridor, in case Lex should take it into his head to get up and disturb us. He didn’t. He was only too thankful to be able to lie down in peace. I visited him occasionally. At Winchester he stared into the night, and burbled something about King Alfred and Law. He was a well-read blighter.

After Basingstoke, where the line from Salisbury joined that from Southampton, we were–potentially, at any rate –in danger again. I felt it was slight. To the police, after checking the likely trains, it must appear that we were still in or around Salisbury. It was certain, however, that there would be a routine control at Waterloo. I wanted to leave the train at one of the suburban stations, but Sandorski wouldn’t have it; he feared that, as the only passengers getting out, we should attract attention.

Three quarters of our job, he said, was now done. Lex had his briefcase and papers seemingly intact, and so long as he kept away from us there was nothing to prevent him from leaving the terminus and taking a taxi to 26 Fulham Park Avenue. The police had no description of him. What happened to us didn’t matter much, but it would be more comfortable and discreet to be arrested in Fulham Park Avenue than elsewhere.

We woke up Lex, who was feeling brighter, and Sandorski gave him instructions in rapid German, which he translated to me afterwards. Early in the morning Lex was to telephone Heyne-Hassingham and tell him that he had escaped during some trouble or other at the landing of the plane, which looked like an attempt to kidnap him. He had got clear, had spent the day in a village, lying low and finding out where he was, and had then taken a late train to London. He was to obey his instructions to hand over his briefcase to Heyne-Hassingham in person, and he was to ask Heyne-Hassingham to come to London to receive it. He was not to talk of his adventures or to mention his address on the telephone, but simply to say he was where he had been told to go in any emergency.

The train pulled into Waterloo. We pushed Lex out onto the platform, and said goodby. Then we hid under the seats, feeling unnecessarily cowardly. It was wiser, however, to reach Sandorski’s friend Roland, if we could, without a chance of police or Hiart or Hiart’s agents intervening.

We stayed under the seats for about twenty minutes while the train was trundled out, and banged back and forth in the yards. It stopped at one or two unpromising places, where we were in a blaze of lights and suspended above South London on arches. We didn’t like the look of them, and remained. Then an army of cleaners swarmed over our train.

“Quick! Sleep!” Sandorski ordered.

He pulled the cork out of the rum, and dropped the bottle on the floor. We lay back snoring. A fearsome female, all dirt, muscles and overalls, poked us with the end of her broom.

” ‘Ere!” she exclaimed. “Look what ‘appened to the drop you were tykin’ ‘ome for muvver!”

“Where are we?” I murmured, with a stage hiccup.

“On the bleedin’ British Rylewyes,” she said. “And don’t think because you own ‘em, you can myke ‘em a bleedin’ ‘otel.”

We staggered to our feet, and I’m damned if Sandorski didn’t try to kiss her. That got him altogether too much good will, and if some kind of official hadn’t come along I doubt if anything would have saved him from a fate worse than death right there in the compartment. The official was sternly humorous. He was evidently quite accustomed to finding bits of rubbish like ourselves routed out by cleaners from late trains. He collected our tickets, escorted us firmly to a gate and left us free in London.

It was dark and cold and raining. Somewhere near Vauxhall Bridge we found a taxi, and told the driver to take us to Fulham Park Avenue and stop at the corner. He seemed to know what corner, so I left it at that. The empty, mournful streets were unending. I hoped the children were asleep. I knew Cecily wouldn’t be.

“Now look here, Colonel, my lad!” said Sandorski. “You leave it all to me. Not a word about Riemann! You’ve just been helping me. I picked you up on your shoot. Thought you were obviously a useful chap. We don’t know anything about the corpse in the car. Leave him out altogether. Tell the rest as it happened.”

No. 26 was an unassuming block of flats, three stories high. No lift. No porter. Just the place for quiet comings and goings with no questions asked. As we hesitated invitingly in front of the closed door, I thought I saw somebody in the wet and gleaming patch of darkness across the road flash a torch quickly towards the roof of No. 26. Sandorski waited, confident in his friend’s arrangements.

The front door opened quietly.

“Well, Peter?” whispered a voice. “Got here after all, by Jove!”

“Anyone come in?” Sandorski asked.

“Yes. He’s up there.”

“With parcel?”

“With parcel.”

“Then you won’t have anything to do till morning. Take us where we can talk.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” said the voice. “It’s cold up there on the water tank.”

Two men came out of the house and closed the door behind them. We all walked away together. The chap next to Sandorski was slim and fair. In dark sweater and wind-breaker, with a disreputable hat, he looked much like my idea of an enterprising burglar. His walk and bearing, however, were free and casual. The man as my side–and very close to my side he was–had a conventional hat and overcoat. His face was heavy but intelligent–and, at the moment, remarkably expressionless. We walked to the police car, which was parked some distance away, in an embarrassing silence. When we got there, my companion asked me if I were Colonel Taine.

“Mr. Taine,” I corrected him.

“I have a warrant for your arrest on a charge of murder of a person unknown–” and he gave me the details and the usual caution.

I don’t mind saying that his neutral, even kindly voice moved me to a sheer panic such as I’ve never felt in all my life.

“You can take down any damn thing you please in evidence against us,” interrupted Sandorski cheerfully. “Got a sharp pencil–ha?”

“Peter,” the other man said to him with the utmost seriousness, “you do understand that if you have broken the law I can’t help you, don’t you?”

“Haven’t even hit a policeman,” Sandorski replied. “Get on with it! Where can we talk?”

“Why not my flat–if you’ve no objection, Inspector?”

I think that perhaps this friend of Sandorski’s–and now of mine–would prefer me not to give his name and address. So I will continue to call him Roland, and merely say that his flat was warm and welcome–especially when he had produced something to eat from the icebox. The policeman was Inspector Haldon of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch.

Sandorski told our story. He said that he had come to England on information received, and left it at that. He had run into me when exploring the shoot, and I had agreed to help him. We had found the beacons and intercepted the plane, and we knew nothing at all about the body in the car. Then he told them of the international connections of the People’s Union, and that it was Robert Heyne-Hassingham and Hiart who had organized the illicit landing.

Roland was at first inclined to think that Sandorski was romanticizing. He said that nobody could be such a fool as to take the People’s Union seriously, not even its founder; and he was horrified at the suggestion that Hiart, who was almost a colleague of his, could be implicated.

He appealed to Inspector Haldon, who grinned in answer.

“I must admit, sir,” he said, “that Colonel Hiart–well, it has been suggested that he was rather too thick with some of his opposite numbers abroad. We keep an open mind, of course, but–”

”Good God, Haldon!” Roland exclaimed, really shocked. “Do you watch me too?”

“Fatherly, sir, fatherly,” said the inspector. “Now General, I understand that you telephoned Mr. Roland last night to wire Flat 9 for sound in order that you could prove your innocence and Mr. Taine’s. What are we going to hear?”

“You are going to hear that courier speak to Heyne-Hassingham, and I hope you’re going to hear him hand over the documents.”

Then Sandorski told him what the documents were.

“Now you see why we ran for it–ha? If Hiart had got his hands on that briefcase, it soon would have gone up in smoke, wouldn’t it? And if the police had it first, he’d have sworn the papers were forged by a mad Pole. Crazy general. Brains removed for experiment in prison camp. Lands planes. Burns cars. And the passenger, so that he can’t talk–ha? I’d have had a hard time proving it wasn’t so. I may have, still. I’m not sure Heyne-Hassingham will come. He might send Hiart.”

“He won’t do that,” said Roland. “Hiart’s in hospital.”

“Pink shot him?”

“Good Lord, Peter, this is England! He fractured his skull when his car tipped over.”

“Now this is all very well, sir,” said the inspector genially. “But what we want to know is if General Sandorski can throw any light at all on that burned body.”

“I? Didn’t know a thing about it till the cops called on Taine.”

“Or you, Mr. Taine?”

“No,” I said, “no … no.”

“Would it surprise you to know that the man had been dead some weeks before he was burned?”

“It would delight me,” said Sandorski. “Here’s my passport! You can see I wasn’t in England.”

“And Mr. Taine?”

“It’s only a week since I met the general,” I replied, as if that fixed it.

Well of course it did. My life was an open book. Haldon must have been wholly content that I had no conceivable motive to go around murdering strangers until Sandorski turned up.

“By the way,” the inspector asked, “what did you do with Mr. Bear’s limousine? We’d better get hold of that before there is any trouble about it.”

“Left it at Salisbury.”

“Then youdidcome by train?”

“Sure we did,” said Sandorski. “Why not? Give your chaps a lecture any time you like, Inspector. Hints and Tips on Train Control.”

Roland let us camp in his flat, while he and Haldon returned to duty at 26 Fulham Park Avenue. The inspector didn’t exactly put us on parole, but he did warn us that he had a man outside, and that we couldn’t avoid publicity and a magistrate’s court if we tried to escape. As soon as they had gone, I tried to call Cecily. Only after sweating with fury did I remember that twelve hours before Sandorski had cut the line.

I thought that our excitement and exhaustion were too insistent for sleep but some time after dawn we must both have dozed off, for we were awakened by Roland returning with the news that it was eleven o’clock and that he had a transcript of the telephone conversation between Lex and Heyne-Hassingham.

Lex had done very well. He had a fine Central European obstinacy. The butler tried to put him off. He kept on ringing, and attracted the private secretary. At last he got on to the great leader himself. Heyne-Hassingham had been very cagey and incredulous, but Lex started to give him the exact details of when he had been sent and by whom. Then Heyne-Hassingham exploded:

“Good God, Riemann!”

Roland looked at us for an explanation, but both Sandorski and I were blank–I fear, suspiciously blank. Of course Heyne-Hassingham had believed the corpse in the car to be Lex, and he now saw that it must be the vanished Riemann.

After that he wanted Lex to come down to his house in Dorset, but Lex wasn’t having any. He thought London-was much safer–and I’m not surprised. So, on second thoughts, did Heyne-Hassingham. He had promised to drive up to town immediately.

Roland packed us into the back of his car, with a very formidable character sitting between us. A former commando sergeant-major, I should think. He looked too lawless for any policeman. It was clear that we were by no means trusted yet.

“Does Heyne-Hassingham know whose body that was in the car?” asked Roland, as soon as he had cleared Trafalgar Square and was driving evenly westwards along the Mall.

“He does,” the general answered. “What was the name he exclaimed when Lex called him up? Something like Riemann, wasn’t it?”

“He knows who killed him, too?”

“No. Thinks I did. He’ll tell you so.”

“How good is your alibi really?” Roland asked, staring straight ahead of him into the traffic.

“Perfect. I was in Vienna up to last week.”

“Day and night, Peter?”

“Nearly. I’d have needed a damn fast plane if I did it– and you ought to know my funds don’t run to that.”

Before we turned into Fulham Park Avenue we were stopped by one of Haldon’s men, who told us that half an hour after the conversation between Lex and Heyne-Hassingham two chaps had turned up in the street and were hanging about; one of them was known to be the Fulham secretary of the People’s Union. It was a sure bet that they were going to report to the revered leader, when his car stopped at the corner, whether anyone suspicious had gone into No. 26.