Текст книги "Watcher in the Shadows "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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“It’s more likely,” Ian said, “that some crazy ex-Nazi who has just been let out of jail is taking revenge on you for spying on him or Hitler or what-have-you.”

I pointed out that my cover had never been broken. Also I doubted if former enemies ever took revenge on each other when war was long over. It was out of character. They were too tired of it all.

“Yes. I am. Well, we’ll go to Scotland Yard straight away. Somebody there ought to remember who I was. You’ll be guarded as if you were the Prime Minister.”

“So was Hans Weber,” I said.

“But damn it, you shall be!”

I reminded him that no private citizen could be efficiently guarded forever. An assassin ready to wait ten years would be perfectly ready to wait a few months more, taking a look at the setup from time to time to see how careless the victim and the man in the turned-down hat and mackintosh were getting. I wasn’t going to have policemen on my walks, testing my meals, sitting outside the museum. I hated policemen. I’d had enough of them. And I should be executed just the same – not tomorrow or next week, but as soon as we were all convinced that the danger was over.

“Suppose we have your whole story published?” he suggested. “I should think any Sunday paper would jump at it.”

“I am still not prepared, Ian, to look any person in the eyes who knows I was a captain in the Gestapo at Buchenwald. And what is half the world going to say? The blighter betrayed his country to save his neck, and they gave him British nationality for it.”

“Nonsense! Of course they wouldn’t! And what about your Scarlet Pimpernel stuff? There’s no trouble in proving that!”

Perhaps. But then I doubted it. It was true that I had planned escapes – could have planned a lot more of them if the wretched inmates of the camp had been lunatics enough to trust a Gestapo captain. The most spectacular was the rescue of Catherine Dessayes and Olga Coronel from Ravensbrück when they were due for the gas chamber. They knew that Hauptmann von Dennim was responsible but they couldn’t know that he was not just adding corruption to corruption —a Gestapo swine heavily bribed by the enemy.

“I told you at the time you were a fool not to accept your George Cross,” Ian said.

“One does not defile a decoration.”

“Take ‘em a bit seriously, don’t you? And anyway it isn’t fair to your assassin. It would surely make him think twice if he knew you as Graf Karl von Dennim, G.C.”

“Another very good reason why Charles Dennim should handle him gently and deal with him personally, Ian.”

“Oh, my God, you would say that!”

I calmed him down. What I had to propose was really very sensible. I did not want to die in the least – or at least I hadn’t wanted to until all these memories were forced back on me —and I did not believe that month after month any police guard could be effective against a man who was patient and implacable, who had leisure and money and no criminal record.

But if I could recognize him or describe him, the German police would do the rest. I might even be able to reason with him. At the very worst I could kill him, provided self-defense was evident.

“And what I want from you, Ian,” I said, “is to be my secret agent after all the years I was yours, plus a cottage to live in and an excuse for being in it.”

“A neighbor of mine has got two badger setts on his land,” he replied doubtfully. “You could be studying their diet. He says they kill his chickens.”

“Well, you can tell him from me they don’t. If it isn’t a fox – and I suppose he knows – it’s probably a polecat gone wild.”

“Jim Melton turned some of his polecat ferrets loose after myxomatosis killed off the rabbits,” he said. “You could watch the blasted things. Or badgers. The cottage I can manage, though it’s some way from my place. But that is all the better. How are you going to persuade him to follow you?”

“By making it easy. As soon as he sees that the house is shut up he can get my forwarding address from half a dozen different places.”

“That will puzzle him,” Ian objected. “It should be much harder to get your address. If one is going to tie out a fat goat for a tiger, it is essential to let the tiger think he has found it for himself.”

I did not care for the metaphor, though I have since adopted it. But at the first hearing it offended me. It was too typically and heartily English.

“It won’t take him long to decide that I am carrying on my normal life and have no police protection,” I said.

Ian thought it most improbable that his tiger would believe me so unimaginative, especially after the pamphlet with the cross on the officers’ mess. And if he had me under observation, as he presumably did, he must have seen that I had changed my habits and was offering no easy chances. The right move, Ian suggested, was to appear to have bolted from home in a panic and to leave a trail which could be picked up.

“But what about that admirable aunt of yours?”

“I’ve fixed that. She’ll be staying with a dear, old friend of hers who lives near Badminton. All she knows is that I am shortly off on a squirrel-watching expedition.”

“Well, it may work,” he said, showing a first spark of enthusiasm, “though nothing on earth would persuade me to tackle the former Graf von Dennim on ground of his own choosing. All right. First, cottage. Second, a scratch organization to tell you when there is a stranger about and what his movements are. But I reserve the right to call in the police when you are certain of your man – and you’ll be ninety per cent certain if you see a Buchenwald face which you recognize. Is there anything else?”

“An arm. I have only a sixteen-bore. And that’s no good. Nor is a rifle, I must have an automatic.”

“I cannot help there,” he said. “The police require very good reasons before they will issue a certificate. You’ll have to convince them that your life is in danger.”

I impressed it on him again that I was not going to convince the police of anything nor explain to them my past. We argued it all out once more.

At last and rather coldly he declared:

“Very well. I have to admit that this is probably the best way of catching the man. But I can’t be mixed up in it beyond a point. Do you realize that if you are caught with a pistol you will be very heavily fined and there will be exhaustive inquiries where you got it from?”

That seemed to me a comically minor risk. Ian had reverted very thoroughly to civilian legality and probably hoped – by God, I could understand it! – that he would never hear of any of his disquieting wartime friends again. Still, he could have used his influence somewhere to obtain an automatic for me. But did he understand, in spite of his goat and man-eater, how close the parallel really was? Perhaps he didn’t. He was thinking in terms of a police decoy for catching bag-snatchers in the park.

That was all. I left Singleton Court – as a matter of principle —by way of the basement and the dustbins, and came out into Gloucester Road. I felt a little more lonely than when I went in – which was most unfair to Ian but may not have been bad for me. Loneliness was a challenge. It shifted my thinking into a gear remembered but long unused.

The question of an arm. To acquire one illegally was a test of how fit I still was to protect myself. I knew no more of criminal society than any other respectable citizen. The fellows who held up bank cashiers must get their weapons somewhere, but the newspapers did not tell us how.

What to wear. A dirty lounge suit, bought cheap and off the peg just after the war, seemed right. A turtle-necked sweater under it was, at any rate, noncommittal. I could not leave the house in them since Georgina’s curiosity might be aroused. So I carried the clothes in a brown paper parcel and changed in a public lavatory.

My destination was Soho. After wandering around to find a cafe where the customers were neither too young nor too exclusively Italian, I entered a revolting joint just off Wardour Street and sat down, speaking just enough broken English to order a cup of coffee. After ten minutes two scruffy individuals, with a show of heartiness towards the foreigner, got into conversation with me and found that I spoke only German. They cleared off soon and sent me a German-speaking lady of the town. She was a hard-faced rubbery creature of the type to betray her own mother for money. I pretended to be much taken with her and assured her we would have a wonderful time if only I could sell —I swore her to secrecy – if only I could sell a Luger.

The following afternoon I was there again. She introduced me to a large and slimy crook who was an obvious copper’s nark. He may have had a police card in his pocket or merely have been in police pay. I don’t know. And, to be fair, I suppose he might have been entirely convincing to anyone without a sense of smell trained to spot his type. He was living proof that I was wise to undertake my own protection. If I could smell police, so could my enemy. God knew what the tiger’s past had been, but it was safe to assume that he had experience of an underground more deadly than that of London Transport.

My hard-working female friend acted as interpreter. She was disappointed when I denied all knowledge of any Luger. No doubt she had reckoned that a sure couple of quid from the police was a lot better than a mere promise from me.

When the nark had gone she took me to another cafe where I was inspected from various angles and kitchen doors. There was a good deal of mysterious coming and going —Harry fetching Alf, and Alf knowing where Jim might be and so forth. It struck me that in criminal circles far too many people are expected to keep secrets. At last and in a third cafe I met the genuine buyer. He could have been anything from a bookmaker’s runner to a bus conductor. The only quality which one could sense in all that neutral smoothness was contempt for the public.

How was the Luger to be handed over? I put on a show of fear and suspicion, and insisted on a quiet spot where there was no chance of being arrested by the police or set upon by a gang. The rubber lady assisted with a most incompetent translation and made me appear even stupider than the naive, self-confident type of German crook which I was playing. It was perfectly clear to any person of normal intelligence – and he had plenty – that when he brought the money I intended to hold him up with the Luger and grab it. We arranged a meeting at ten-thirty when it would be dark. Curie was to take me to the rendezvous. He explained to her at length where it was – a bombed site off Haverstock Hill.

I telephoned Georgina that I should be home late and bought her a box of chocolates of about the right size to hold a Luger. Then I had some dinner and afterwards picked up my cinematically bosomed sweetheart. I was glad to see that she had been instructed to take me discreetly to Haverstock Hill by bus, not by traceable taxi.

She showed me the bombed site and said she would wait for me. I watched her scuttling off as soon as she believed she was out of sight. It all seemed to be going very well, though I could foresee complications if the buyer brought a companion. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t. His own gun – of course I was praying all the time that he had one —should be quite enough to intimidate me.

I waited for him a quarter of an hour, feeling his presence and once hearing him, while he sensibly satisfied himself that I was alone. After that it was all very quick. He held me up straight away and ordered me to drop my parcel. I whined with surprise and terror. It was quite unnecessary for him to tell me what he would do if I raised my voice. He was most disappointed that the likely box contained only chocolates and came for me, as so many men do when they have lost their tempers, carelessly waving his gun about. I had expected it would be more difficult.

But I really did congratulate myself on finesse – until that is, I examined his automatic. It was a miserable Italian .22, accurate enough for killing but with no stopping power at all. However, it would have to do. I shifted him into the shadow of a wall where he was unlikely to be noticed until he came round, replaced the lid on the box of chocolates, and returned to my suburb and my aunt.

Sprang Trap

I looked out of the bedroom window of the cottage which Ian had found for me with a rising of spirits that I had not felt for years. Not that the scene was in any way unfamiliar; during my months of field work on the smaller mammals I generally rented a room from some kindly old body who was prepared to make my bed and produce simple meals at irregular intervals. The cause of my temporary content was probably relief at being clear of London.

My vulnerability had been getting on my nerves. There was one duty which I hated: attending as principal witness the inquest on the postman. Since time and place were public knowledge, my presence was detestably dangerous. It did have one advantage. If my follower was among the public or idly – possibly hopefully – watching from a side street, he could satisfy himself that I was in no way guarded and would feel more free to ask questions.

Both Ian and I felt certain that he would not try to trace me by writing a letter. If I were submitting to the police all letters from unknown correspondents, he would give some clue, however slight, to the postman’s murderer for the laboratories to work on.

But he could risk telephoning to Georgina or the museum or a few other obvious places to ask for my address. None of them had it. I told them all that I had not yet decided exactly where I would be staying and would let them know later. That would look to him as if I had hidden myself or perhaps as if the police had hidden me.

What would he do then? Ask discreet questions. Try the milkman, for example. No luck. The firm of builders repairing the damage? That wouldn’t do him any good either. I had made a point of telling the chief clerk that the firm could get in touch with me at any time through the museum.

What about the plasterer, painter and carpenter working on the house? It was an obvious place for the police to plant an agent. He’d have to be careful with them. Still, if he were patient and prepared to watch the men home he could be pretty sure that they were what they appeared to be. When at last he risked a question, it would give him what he wanted to know. In a great hurry on leaving the house and pretending to be nervous about gutters and the horrid little portico over the front door I had made a disastrous slip and given the carpenter my real address.

It would take time to pick up the clue; but I counted on the care and patience with which he had arranged the execution of Hans Weber. I reckoned that he would spend at least a couple of weeks in finding out the address, arranging a base for himself and avoiding possible traps. Meanwhile I could familiarize myself with the country and watch badgers.

The cottage which Ian had rented for me was in North Buckinghamshire, in the parish of Hernsholt and about a mile from the village. Far away to the north and east stretched the blue-hazed plain of the south Midlands – elm and oak as far as the eye could reach.

It was, in fact, fairly open pasture, neatly and thickly hedged, with only a few small coverts where foxes bred under the clatter of wood pigeons; but seldom were there fifty yards of hedge without a great tree. Seen over a distance, as from my bedroom window, England seemed to have returned to the temperate forest out of which the Saxons cut and cultivated their holdings. I felt a deeper sympathy for that solid race of pioneers – because I too was still searching for home – than most native English. They have a romantic passion for the still older strains in their ancestry.

The cottage was known as the Warren. It belonged to a widow who had gone out to stay with a son in Australia, and it was still ladylike even when I had packed away all breakable ornaments. It had electricity, a telephone, and a water supply piped from a spring at the back.

Around the spring was a copse of willows. It gave little real cover except at night, but I did not care for it until my eyes were accustomed to its light and shadow. In front of the cottage was a half acre of overgrown garden and, beyond it, the Long Down —a stretch of well-drained upland which had been an airfield during the war. The desolate concrete runways, the air-raid shelters and the aircraft bays were still there. Over and among them sheep and cattle pastured.

Though it was only fifty miles from London my retreat gave such an impression of quiet remoteness that I began to doubt whether the goat could be found. An address written in a casual workman’s notebook seemed a slender connection with me. Yet it was certain that the tiger would haunt my suburb and finally risk approaching the empty house when every other line of inquiry had failed. When he followed me he should be noticeable. The district was without holiday-makers to confuse the issue. There was nothing to do but farm, breed horses or fatten cattle.

I spent the first few days completing a fast and thorough reconnaissance of my surroundings. I made no mystery of myself —and the badgers were there in plenty to account for my movements. I decided to have no observable communication with Ian, not even by telephone. His formidable past was too widely known, and I wanted to appear friendless and unprotected to any investigator.

We did, however, have an optional rendezvous at a bridge over the slow Claydon Brook on Ian’s normal road to and from Buckingham. At four every afternoon he proposed to drive across it. In the stream was a willow snag which he could see from his car. If it had its usual trailer of dead water weed all was well and there was nothing to report. If it was clear of weeds I was waiting close by for an opportunity to talk.

That Wednesday morning, the fifth day since my arrival, was a perfection of English summer. The new leaves of the great pear-shaped trees which closed the horizon hung motionless, awaiting the first trial of heat. After coffee and bacon I idled in the garden, feeling inclined to take a hoe and discourage the weeds like a good tenant instead of doing a third exploration of the Long Down.

The Long Down was important. It would be my main line of communication as soon as there was any suspicious sign of interest in me. I was certainly not going to risk the lane which led to my cottage, bordered by thick hedges on both sides. But moving across the disused airfield I could always be sure that I was not followed; and if I had reason to think I was, I could vanish among the aircraft bays and the low brick foundations, overgrown by brambles, where huts had once been. It would be impossible to tell by what path I intended to leave the down or whether I had not already left it.

I decided to weed. I wanted to discourage the dog. It belonged, I was told, to some feckless woman on the far side of the Long Down who worked in a factory at Wolverton and might or might not return home at night. She left the animal outside her cottage with a dirty plate of bread and stale canned dog food. No one would have been surprised if she had expected it to open the cans. The dog spent its days on the down, pouncing disconsolately on beetles, and was delighted to find a companion with nothing obvious and agricultural to do.

I might as well have reconnoitered my territory waving a red flag as followed by this unavoidable dog, which had the bounce of a terrier and the reproachful affection of a spaniel, both very evidently among its ancestors. It was not trainable. Even if it had been, no dog – except a poacher’s lurcher – can move as silently as a man.

So I spent that gently blazing morning in the garden, and in the afternoon took a bus to Bletchley. I wanted to familiarize myself with the likely routes to and from the station. My very vaguely formed picture of the enemy’s character suggested that he might avoid the risk of car number plates, whether true or false, and use the railway. In any case he would soon find out that I avoided roads and that in following my movements between the cottage and the badgers a car was no help. I myself would have liked to borrow one; but I had no car in London – both Georgina and I with our limited incomes preferred wine to petrol – and it might have appeared unnatural suddenly to have private transport at my disposal in the country.

I did my shopping in Bletchley and returned to the cottage with veal cutlets, new potatoes and peas. Then, feeling the need of human society with which to share my thirst and the beauty of the evening, I strolled up the lane to my village of Hernsholt and entered the Haunch of Mutton.

Ferrin, the landlord, was alone. He was a thin, ironical man in his early fifties, with an air of knowing the utter worthlessness of humanity and enjoying it all the same. He was generally smiling and silent, but occasionally produced a comment as devastating as that of some nihilistic cartoonist. The habit was good for trade. Local customers would sit over a second drink in the hope of being shocked by whatever Mr. Ferrin might say next.

He served me with a long whisky and soda, and watched me till the glass was nearly empty.

“Like it down here?” he asked.

I said I did, and that it was a peaceful spot.

“Too peaceful for business.”

“They watch the telly instead, I suppose?”

“That won’t last long,” he said. “But they’ll soon find something else to stop ‘em thinking. It’s all up with the pubs and the churches. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear of a take-over bid from one or the other any day now.”

I replied that I didn’t much care which admirable tradition ran the other so long as it wasn’t the popular press. That seemed to please him, but he still returned to probing me.

“My father used to swear there was nothing like a badger ham. You’d be all against that, I expect?”

“Not a bit. But I shouldn’t kill in a sett which I was watching. It spoils the fun.”

“Breakfast is breakfast and science is science, like?”

“Exactly.”

“Have another on the house,” he said, refilling my glass without waiting for an answer. “You should try the bitter some time. It’s a small brewery and it don’t put water in the beer to pay for the advertising. Colonel Parrow is one of the directors. That’s how I come to be here.”

It seemed wise to take advantage of this marvelously oblique approach to my character and my business while we were still alone, though I did not know what story Ian had told him.

“You were under the colonel in the war?” I asked.

“Not under him and not over him, in a manner of speaking. I was mess sergeant in one of his hush-hush joints. And you’d be surprised what I used to hear once they got into the habit of not stopping talking when I came round with the drinks. But if I’d asked a question they’d have hung me from a parachute and dropped me on Hitler. That’s what I told Isaac Purvis.”

“Who’s he?”

“Works on the roads for the District Council. You said good morning to him the other day when he was clearing a ditch in Satters Bottom.”

“I remember. A little dried-up chap in his sixties.”

“Seventies, more like. Well, day before yesterday a stranger comes up to him and asks which we called the Nash road. Is that of any interest to you?”

I have always been sure that if England were ever occupied its people would find the organization of underground cells an almost effortless means of self-expression. On the surface they are so open, and yet so naturally and unconsciously secretive about anything which is of real importance to them.

“Yes,” I answered. “But there are four other houses along the Nash road besides my cottage. Was Mr. Purvis able to find out which he wanted?”

“No. He couldn’t keep him —though he’s a rare one for conversation. Lucky if you get away after half an hour of the Council’s time! But he noticed the chap didn’t go to the Worralls. And I saw Slade and Parish last night, and he didn’t go there. So that only leaves you and Mrs. Bunn —who never has a visitor, I’d say, but the vicar and the district nurse.”

“What sort of man was he?”

“Big, dark, clean-shaven.”

“A foreigner?”

“No. A gentleman, Isaac Purvis said.”

On my leisurely way back to the cottage I decided that the inquirer had been someone out for an innocent walk who had asked his way earlier and had been told to take the Nash road. It was far too early for the arrival of the tiger.

What kind of man was Isaac Purvis describing? It seemed odd that one couldn’t be both a foreigner and a gentleman. I vaguely understood what he meant from continental parallels, but Aunt Georgina would have been on surer ground.

Any of the younger generation who still used the outdated term at all would probably mean by “gentleman” a person who was well-spoken and apparently well-educated. But I had a feeling that in the mouth of an old and prejudiced agricultural laborer accustomed to judge from unconscious depths of instinct and experience, the word implied the manner and clothes of someone born to the ownership of the land. That suggested the phrase in my Austrian friend’s letter – a man with plenty of money and unlimited time at his disposal.

On the other hand, surely my enemy could not be English? But Isaac Purvis would be unreliable on that point. He was an authority on manner, not on accent and sentence rhythm. It was most improbable that anyone in the district could guess that I myself, for example, was of foreign birth —though a careful listener with some knowledge of other languages might detect it.

All the same, I reminded myself that any doubt was still a doubt and that it might be wise to act as if my cell had passed me a preliminary warning. I avoided the Nash road and the short track which led from it to the Warren. I went home across the fields, passing cautiously through the willow screen to my back door.

The evening sun flooded into the kitchen through the open window. All the sounds were peaceful. Under the window the mongrel from the Long Down was snoring. Above it a bee and two bluebottles were noisily trying to get out in the one place where it was impossible. A chewed mess of brown paper and string was on the floor. The veal cutlets which I had left on the kitchen table were inside that damned dog – as for a moment I called it.

I think I had already opened my mouth to rouse it from its stertorous slumber when I realized that its position under the window, its f ailing asleep instead of escaping with the loot, its continuing to sleep when I was an angry foot away from it were all wholly unnatural. I backed out through the door, remembering that the executioner of Sporn, Dickfuss and Weber liked to be in at the death.

The summer silence was still absolute, except for the cawing of a rook. I disappeared into the willow copse, keeping the house between myself and the garden, and reached the shelter of the boundary hedge. A deep ditch, taking the water which poured off the Long Down after rain as well as the winter overflow of the spring, bounded three sides of the garden. Very slowly I followed this round to the front gate and back again, inspecting every shrub and patch of cover where a man could crouch and keep the cottage under observation. I had no intention whatever of surprising him, for I had foolishly left the pistol in my suitcase under my bed. I merely wanted to satisfy myself that he was not in the house.

There was nothing to be gained by funking the next step. I had produced the situation I intended to produce. If I cleared out now or ran dithering to the police I should merely have a quite illusory period of peace while the big, dark, clean-shaven gentleman occupied himself with his presumably gentlemanly pursuits and waited.

I took the carving knife from the kitchen and a rolled-up rug for a shield. Then I went through those upstairs rooms with all the old technique I could remember—flinging open each door, guarding my back and letting the rug enter first. There was no doubt that on my own ground I was alone.

Having recovered that miserable .22 I sat down in the living room, first brushing the chair with my hands. I could very well be finished off by the schoolboy trick of a drawing-pin in my seat. But that was carrying imagination a little far. I ordered myself not to overdo precautions. Steady routines would be indispensable and sufficient – like shaking out boots in the tropics before putting them on.

Now what exactly had happened? The first plain fact was that the tiger had decided that speed of action was safer than hanging about and giving a clue to his identity; even if I did have police protection, both they and I were likely to take things easy for the first few days. He must already have got my address through the carpenter. He’d had some stroke of luck there. I could not believe he had taken the risk of calling at the house.

My return from Bletchley had been observed and my departure for the Haunch of Mutton. Having satisfied himself that the cottage was not watched, he had walked in and poisoned the cutlets. His next move was doubtful. He might be safely on his way to London, awaiting with interest whatever the papers had to tell him, or he might be still close at hand.

The dog was not yet dead. That had to be explained. If you could not be certain how much time you had to play with, surely you would use a fast poison? Probably he could not lay his hands on one which was quite tasteless. After all he had not the resources of a government or a terrorist gang behind him. He worked cautiously and alone for his own lonely revenge.

I examined the cottage for any conceivable clue to his movements and from old habit looked for a microphone, though I could not imagine what use he could make of it. This led me to the discovery that the telephone had been cut outside the kitchen where it entered the house.

That was a puzzle. Suppose I had discovered the break before I had supper? Suppose there was an arrangement with the police that they were to call at fixed hours and turn up at once if they had no reply? Both these points must have occurred to the man before he cut the telephone. My tentative answer was that the drug did not work instantaneously or imperceptibly. There was half a minute while the victim felt so queer that his one impulse was to telephone a doctor.