Текст книги "Watcher in the Shadows "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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On the other hand, he had no variety of thoughts to play with. He had only one. I never saw such a set and concentrated expression; he might have been tracking me one single bend of the road behind me. And the spring when he caught up would be as deadly as any tiger’s – merciless, for that man believed he was executing those whom the law had not considered quite worthy of death. Yet a general motive was not enough to account for such patience and dedication. There must surely be a precise and personal motive. What was it? I expected to know as soon as I saw him, but I still did not.

It was now that a plan occurred to me, partly because I was close to one of the badger setts which were my cover for staying in the district, partly because I was most reluctant to spend another night at the Warren.

My intention was to trap him unhurt – or only slightly hurt. The case against him for the murder of the postman was building up. He must have been seen in my suburb, and here he was again on my tail. Looking at it, however, from a weary inspector’s point of view, there was still no evidence but the word of an ex-Gestapo officer who very deservedly saw things under his bed, and could give no clear and sane motive for being persecuted by someone who was not in Buchenwald – or, indeed, by anyone who was.

If this fellow was of irreproachable character and standing – which was the impression he gave me —he could not be arrested, only questioned and then carefully watched while his description was circulated to German police. That was not good enough. That would not put him out of action and give me freedom from fear.

Clear evidence. A charge upon which he could be held in jail while full investigation of him was made. Those were what I must have. And if he would kindly look back once more to see if I were coming along the road behind him, I thought I could get them.

I gave him three minutes, then climbed a gate into the road and followed. I felt pretty safe. There was no reason for him to hang about or double back. What he ought to do before giving me up altogether was to sit down in comfort by a line of firs above and to the right of the road. From there he could probably see Stoke and certainly see me, strolling innocently along right into that shot from the hedge which I had so dreaded the night before.

I did not oblige him by going all the way, but turned off to the left along a field path. The country was open. If he were up among the firs he could see all my movements through his glasses – a most expensive pair which I envied – until I arrived at the patchy cover where the badger sett was.

It was a typical badger fortress, under a tangled mass of thorn and blackberry about twenty yards long, which ran at right angles to a muddy stream. If I had really been intending to study the two or three families which lived in it – there were too many runways for easy observation – I should have crossed the stream and squatted wetly among the rushes to watch them drink and possibly play. But that was an impossible place to tie out the goat for the tiger.

At the other end of this thick wall of vegetation, and a few feet away from it, was a solitary, stunted alder. I cut and twisted a few branches to form a seat in the tree. To make it perfectly clear what I was doing I sat in it and tested it. I also took out my notebook and jotted down details of the badger paths and scratching trees. All the time I was careful to remain in sight of the firs on the higher ground.

But my guess that he was there proved wrong. My guess that he was watching me was right. That was typical of all our moves, his as well as mine. There were too many ifs, and each of us was inclined to mistake a queen for a pawn.

While I was working on the alder, something disturbed the birds upstream where the banks were overgrown. I paid no attention. A couple of minutes later I went round to the other side of the badger fortress, found a place where the vegetation was thin and searched the stream with my glasses. He was there all right, and he had not come down from the firs or I would have seen him. He must have been waiting for me where the road crossed the stream – an admirable place for the temporary disposal of a body. When I turned off into the footpath I had been dangerously close.

So long as he saw me, I did not care where he saw me from. I hoped that all this preparation of the tree would not puzzle him. He looked the sort of person who would recognize a badger sett —he could take it for a fox’s earth if he liked – and would realize that I meant to watch whatever was there from the alder after sunset. It was wildly improbable that he would suspect the truth; that the alder was futile for observation and that I had chosen it because I could be stalked with such ease up the blind side of the fortress.

At last I walked away downstream, leaving him to examine at leisure what I had been up to. When I was out of his sight I broke into a trot, for I had only half an hour to reach the rendezvous with Ian, whose help was essential.

I reached the bridge in time and was just about to go down to the willow snag and clear away the tail of dead water weed undulating in the slow current when I saw old Isaac Purvis leisurely scything the young nettles on the green verge of the road. His bicycle leaned against the hedge —a marvel how the old boy could cycle for miles with the scythe wrapped in sacking over his shoulder – and he appeared to have started on a job which the Rural District Council could well have left till July.

He leaned on his scythe when he saw me hesitate at the bridge, his whole attitude an invitation to join him and talk.

“Nettles are coming on fast this year, Mr. Purvis,” I remarked.

“Grass is what I were cutting,” the old man answered, “a goodish step back, t’other side of the bridge.”

He waited with mischievous eyes to be asked why he had moved. So I did ask.

“You go on up the road, Purvis, says Colonel Parrow, and if you sees the perfesser you give ‘im this ‘ere!”

He slid into my hand a sheet torn from a notebook as neatly as if he were passing a betting slip under the eye of a policeman.

I have a feeling you may want to see me today. I shall he at the bridge about half past four. There’s another report of the stranger whom Ferrin mentioned to you, and I am trying to account for him.

“Very kind of you, Mr. Purvis,” I said.

“It was them Boers what started it,” he remarked obscurely. “Never ‘eard of ‘em again we wouldn’t, if ‘tweren’t for the Kaiser and ‘Itler.”

I had to trunk that one out. There was a sort of mad logic in it, for British insolence and weakness in the Boer War – or so I believe myself – were both partly responsible for 1914.

“You fought in South Africa?” I asked.

“Ah. Yeomanry. And me bowels never been the same since.”

I agreed that the campaign must have been frightening.

“Went down with enteric, I did, like all me troop. And I’ll tell you what cured me though you won’t ‘ardly believe it. I was ridin’ along scarcely ‘oldin’ on me ‘orse when one of them bloody Boers ups and shoots me through the guts. And when I gets to ‘ospital I ‘ear the doctor say: Well, we ain’t got to bother about perforation now, ‘e says, because ‘e’s perforated. I didn’t rightly know what ‘e meant, but I says hallelujah for me luck and I gets well. So when Colonel says to me: It’s a question of atomy, Purvis, I says: Well, they won’t get un, Colonel, not them Boers nor the Americans neither.”

It looked as if Ian had thought that a zoologist was insufficiently melodramatic for his village. If atomy was what I supposed – it seemed an excellent word – I was evidently a professor with some unspecified interest in nuclear fission.

“What did you think of this big, dark man who wanted to know which was the Nash road?” I asked as soon as I could get a word in.

“A pleasant-spoken gentleman,” said Isaac Purvis, as if that was about as far as he could safely go. “Put me in mind of old Worrall, ‘e did.”

“How do you mean exactly?”

“Old Worrall who ‘ad the farm opposite where you’re a-staying. I used to work for ‘im as carter thirty year ago, and I can see ‘im as plain as I sees you. Just as pleasant as ever, ‘e was, after ‘is eldest son ‘ad been took to the mad’ouse, and you’d ‘ave reckoned ‘e thought nothing of it. But one day ‘e says to me: God Almighty is goin’ to pay me for that, Isaac.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. What was there to ‘appen? ‘Is eyes were what I meant. Like a widder’s eyes when the parson tells ‘er that sufferin’ is good for ‘er.”

That vivid phrase brought back my unreasonable sense of guilt, which had been dispersed by fear and anger. Poor devil – if he believed I was the same sort of creature as Sporn and Dickfuss, he had a right to kill me. How long is it since revenge was considered a virtue in a man of honor? A mere three hundred years?

I asked Purvis if he had any reason to think that the big, dark man was a foreigner.

“Well, all I’ve seen of ‘im was three days back. I tells ’im what ‘e wants to know. And then I asks ‘im if ‘e weren’t the new undertaker what Mrs. Bunn wishes to make ‘er own bargain with. ‘E just says that ‘e weren’t.

“I knew as ‘e weren’t. ‘E was just out for a walk in a manner of speakin’. But I says to myself afterwards, I says, now if ‘e was the kind of gentleman what ain’t in a ‘urry and goes walkin’ when ‘e could do it easier in ‘is motor car, then ‘e’d like to ‘ear about Mrs. Bunn making ‘er own arrangements with the undertaker. So I wouldn’t say ‘e ain’t a foreigner and I wouldn’t say as ‘e is.

Mr. Purvis was willing to discuss till five o’clock the character of Englishmen – by which he meant the inhabitants of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. That was perhaps a long time to stand chatting in the open when I did not know where our gentleman had gone, but I did not wish to offend so useful an assistant by cutting him short.

At half past four Ian arrived. We drove off in his car. He seemed a little cold and military because he could not find a certain Jim Melton for whom he had been looking. The only time you could be sure of seeing the blasted man, I gathered, was when he was going into the magistrates’ court to pay a fine for some minor offense or coming out again; and then if you didn’t catch him on the court steps he vanished. An enviable gift, I thought.

Ian wanted me to go with him to Buckingham and have a leisurely dinner somewhere afterwards. When I told him to park the car by the roadside and settle down with me under a convenient haystack, he said he could not see why I found boy-scouting necessary. It was an effort to remember that he knew nothing of the last agitated twenty hours.

I gave him my story from the time I had left the Haunch of Mutton the night before. He did not interrupt. He was always a patient and practiced listener, though one never knew what explosion there might be at the end.

“But you’d got him cold!” he exclaimed. “Why on earth didn’t you hold him up in his bunker or on the road?”

I reminded him that I dared not shoot. There was no evidence to connect this harmless stroller in the brown tweed suit with the dog or with any attempt on me. I might have a fearful time clearing myself if I killed him. And one of us would almost certainly be killed. The fellow was capable of being just as dangerous as any wounded tiger. Even if I could drill him through the shoulder or shoot his gun out of his hand – and I was too long out of practice to be sure of either —my .22 wouldn’t stop him.

“You must have full police protection at once,” Ian insisted. “Don’t you care whether you’re alive or not?”

“Very much. I have a lot of work still to do on the red squirrel.”

I am told that was what I answered. It seems unlikely but possible. At that time I felt that my executioner had a good deal of perverted right on his side. The same memories which obsessed him were, after ten years, still present in my own mind too. So I was not then in love with life for its own sake. Being a healthy animal I was afraid of death. Indeed I was never far from the edge of panic. That can be taken for granted; I needn’t describe it over again. But I found it hard to give a good reason – beyond the red squirrel – why I should live.

I asked him to forget about the police for the moment. What I needed was a witness, preferably him. And then I drew him the sketch map which I reproduce here:

“The trap is timed for the very last of the light,” I explained. “That is when he will come, for he can’t see to shoot later. Here is the layout:

“I am sitting in the alder at A, pretending to watch badgers. He will not take the footpath from the Stoke-Hernsholt road because I could see him as soon as he could see me. He is assuming that I feel well hidden in this bit of country and pretty safe – but I should not be feeling so safe that I would allow an unknown person to approach me after dark.

“He won’t come across the stream because the banks are boggy and he would make a lot of noise. So he will come down the footpath from the north. He has soft turf under foot, and he is hidden from the alder all the way. So he has only to put his hand round the edge of that patch of thick stuff where the badger sett is in order to drop me out of my tree with absolute certainty at a range of five yards. If no one pays any attention to the shot —and why should they? —he has all night at his disposal to finish me off.

“But this is going to be the catch in it. You will work your way back into the brambles at B. It’s all dead stuff, and you can cut out a hole with a pair of garden clippers. Get your legs on soft earth down the badgers’ back door and pile their old bedding – there’s plenty of it about – underneath your body. You won’t be too uncomfortable.

“You will see him long before I do. In fact I shall never see him at all till we’ve got him. When he raises his revolver or automatic to fire, order him to drop it and put his hands up. He won’t. I am sure of that. So you’ll have to let him have it with a twelve-bore. I’m afraid he is bound to lose a hand or a foot at that range and I’m not too sure of my law. But I take it we are only using reasonable force when the intention to murder is plain.”

Ian refused to play without the presence of the police. Naturally enough. I had no reason – beyond my own need —to expect him to have preserved a wartime mentality.

“I’ll telephone the chief constable at once,” he said. “He’s a personal friend. At the shop with me.”

I replied that I had no objection provided the chief constable could, at such short notice, provide us with a policeman guaranteed to he fairly motionless for four hours and not even slap at a midge for the last two of them. What he would give us would be a detective who was very good indeed at sitting in a car or standing inconspicuously on a street corner.

“But he can trail the man,” Ian said, “now that you have predicted his movements.”

I ridiculed that. “‘Good evening, sir, I am a police officer and it is my duty to inquire your business.’ ‘I am enjoying the cool of the evening, officer.’ ‘Your name and address?’ ‘With great pleasure.’

“And he will give it,” I went on, “the correct address where he is staying and the false name he is staying under. But he can’t be detained. And he won’t be there in the morning. There’s not a thing the police can do until they have some evidence of a crime.”

“They can prevent it.”

“They can indeed. But tonight only. And two months later the detective responsible for me is bluffed by a gentleman of obvious respectability who pretends to be the Inspector of Inland Revenue or a Commissioner of Church Lands and calls at half a dozen houses before mine.”

“What about the description? Heavy build? Thick, black eyebrows?”

“He may not have them. I’m doubtful about the eyebrows already. As for the weight – don’t you remember Vasile Mavro and his pneumatic stomach?”

Ian smiled at last.

“It took Vasile weeks to learn to walk as if he were really carrying that stomach,” he said. “After all, this fellow hasn’t been trained by us.”

“Hasn’t he? If he was in Buchenwald or had friends who were, it’s very likely that he was trained by us or some organization nearly as good.”

“But then he can make rings round any county police!” Ian exclaimed.

“Round Special Branch, too —provided that his motive is perplexing, and that he is working alone, not for any political organization. Look at it this way! It was you who first brought up the tiger metaphor. Well, imagine he’s an experienced tiger with a taste for man! I gather that the difficulty is to make and keep contact. In fact it can’t be done without tying out a bait. That’s what I am. I have to be, because we don’t know any other which would tempt him. If you or the police refuse to let me hunt him in my own way I shall be killed in his.

“And here’s one other point! I’d like to talk to the tiger. Suppose I am the last on the list? The murders of Sporn and Dickfuss are nothing. I’d give him a medal for them. If I think he has finished, if I can convince him who and what I really was, I may not hand him over to the police at all.”

“You have forgotten the postman,” Ian protested.

“Punishing him is not going to bring the postman back to life. That could remain between the tiger and his God, so long as he doesn’t force us to send him to hospital.”

It was this argument —the weakest of all —which, I think, persuaded Ian. He had been wavering ever since I suggested the obvious truth that we were dealing with someone who had been a colleague or ally during the war.

“But you’re not going to sit on that nest or machan of yours if the tiger is examining it right now,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Thorns. Didn’t you say you had considered drawing-pins?”

I assured him that was only panic. No one except a pathologist could do much damage with a surface scratch. And anyway there were no thorns on an alder, so why arouse unnecessary suspicion by putting them there?

“What time do I get into position?”

“Let’s say he has finished going over the ground now or half an hour ago. Then he will want a meal, because he didn’t have any lunch. The sooner you are in position the better, but not later than six.”

The mention of meals at once brought out the regimental officer. Ian reproached himself for not realizing earlier that I had eaten nothing since lunch the day before—in fact I had had plenty, though in bits and pieces – and insisted on bringing back some food before he went to ground with the badgers.

Since I had to give way on the question of bringing in the police somewhere, we agreed that Ian should telephone his friend, using a vague and deprecating English manner, to the effect that it was just possible that he had come upon the trail of the parcel which blew up the postman, and that he should give a description of the suspect.

That was sound sense. If the dark gentleman, wounded or not, got away from us after showing his intention, it was a straight police job to hold him for inquiry until Ian could identify him. It was impossible to guess which way he would go, but, since his line of communication was across the Long Down, a patrol car on the far side of it had a chance of picking him up. Ian was also going to ask for police at the corner where the Stoke road entered Hernsholt. He thought he could manage all that on an old boy basis without giving too much away.

His farm was only some three miles off, so that he was back at half past five with a cold chicken and a bottle of wine. He had been able to arrange that two traffic patrols, in the course of their normal routine, should cover the roads leading away from the Long Down between nine and midnight and should keep an eye on parked cars. He could not get police to watch the Hernsholt end of the Stoke road as well and had detailed the invaluable Isaac Purvis for this duty —with strict orders not to interfere in any way with the big man in the brown suit and to telephone police immediately if he appeared to be hurt.

Ian was going to leave his car in Stoke and walk from there. His movements could be watched from the firs or the stream as far as the badger fortress but no farther. Once he had rounded that tangle of thorn and bramble he could hack his way into it. Rather belatedly I remembered that he was over fifty, and advised him to leave all violent action to me if there had to be any.

He replied that he was a hard-working farmer and far fitter than he had been at the end of the war; he guaranteed to carry me any time a hundred yards farther than I could carry him. No, his chief objection to the whole plan was that he had to walk across somebody else’s land carrying a gun and couldn’t think of any convincing excuse if he met the owner.

I ate my chicken and drank half the bottle. A little after seven there was a sharp, freshening shower. I was glad that Ian, farmer or not, was safely tucked into the badger fortress where hardly a drop would penetrate. The evening turned out to be one of gold and gray, innocently English and less glaring than the previous night, which stuck in my mind as black and crimson.

At half past eight I set out and took the field path down from the north, for I was not going to trust myself to the Stoke road. Ian was in position. His field of fire was deadly, but he had made himself a bit too comfortable. The dark hole under dead brambles was obvious as I came along the tiger’s expected line of approach. I bent down a branch and tied it inconspicuously so that the leaves drooped across the mouth of the tunnel.

Then I went round the end of the badger fortress and, presumably, into full view of my executioner if he had already returned to the firs or to the bridge. The nearest patch of cover on that side gave him a range of a hundred and forty yards. I felt at first a little naked, in spite of being certain that he wouldn’t draw attention to himself by carrying a rifle; that if he did have one I should long ago have been found dead in the cottage garden.

I climbed into the alder and sat still. The sun set, and the world became pearl gray. It was such a familiar world. How many times I had watched my gentle, nervous little mammals under exactly similar conditions! I heard badger cubs yelping underground that it was time to go out. They stopped that very suddenly. A sharp nip from mother had probably impressed upon them that there were two smelly boots down the back door and that long and careful exploration was needed before going out of the front.

Partridges called from the tussocky grass behind me. A little owl landed on the hawthorn opposite with what was probably a shrew in his talons. That was the only sign of any violence at all in the hunting dusk. Cows had been let into the field across the stream since the afternoon, and slowly shifted their groupings as they tore at and chewed —most peaceful of sounds —a last bite of the rich grass along the water.

There was no moon, and under the overcast sky the fight faded early. I no longer fussed about the range of a hundred and forty yards; what began to matter was how much we two enemies could see at ten. The stream and its boggy edges protected my front. Out to my right there was featureless meadow upon which anything which moved could be spotted. Behind me was rough grass on a slight but uneven slope, terraced and pitted by the paths of sheep and cattle through the winter mud. I felt confident that my trained ears would hear anyone who tried to move over this; and anyway it was partly covered by Ian. To my left and overshadowing me was the black bulk of the badger fortress, which smothered all possibility of seeing and listening. The darker it got, the more certain I became that my assassin could not miss the opportunity I had arranged for him, and that the trap would work. From moment to moment I expected to hear Ian’s challenge and shot.

The tiger was leaving it late. I wondered again how much he knew of naturalists. In the unlikely event of a badger leaving the sett on my side I would only have seen his streak of white. There was no conceivable point in staying up in the alder unless I intended to take flashlight photographs. And I was not carrying a camera.

For distraction I gave the badgers some of my attention. One had possibly crossed the stream and was keeping his usual obstinate course, for a cow blew hard and moved away. That aroused a question in my mind, but thereafter the movements of the cattle were perfectly natural. I could hear the tearing gradually die away as one by one they lay down. Two or three followed the course of the stream and I could just see the black bulks across the water. Out of sight, immediately below the fortress, another squelched through the boggy ground, then passed across my front and vanished.

After that there was absolute silence. I heard Ian cautiously change position. I knew what the faint crackle was, but the tiger could not possibly know – if, that is, he were anywhere near and not enjoying his after-dinner coffee miles away or waiting for me at the Warren. I decided that I had finished with that cottage. It was a good base for attack if the enemy had given me plenty of time to observe him and his ways, but it was hopeless for defense.

I began to feel drowsy and changed position. It did not matter how much noise I made except from the point of view of putting on a convincing act. The muscles beneath my thighs were sore and painful from resting across a narrow branch, so I drew up my feet and squatted knee to chin. From a distance I must have looked like a bulky, shapeless bird roosting dangerously close to the ground.

It was that movement which saved me. Out of the tail end of my eye I saw the silhouette of the lower end of the badger fortress harden, detach itself and charge. There might have been just time to shoot, but shooting had never been in my mind. From my coiled-spring squat I sailed into the air out of the alder and came down feet foremost on to the great dome of thorn and bramble like Brer Rabbit hitting the briar patch. I sank up to my chest, for the moment not noticing at all the little furies of thorns. I thought I was a better target than ever, but I cannot have been. The longer stems of hawthorn opposite my face must have masked me, though I could see clearly through them.

Ian yelled and struggled to get out of his tunnel. The big, dim figure under the alder jumped back, evidently startled that there was another person present. In half a dozen strides he had merged himself again with the darkness at the lower end of the badger fortress, where he seemed to hesitate. Then I heard him splosh across the stream. I just had time and enough sense to whisper to Ian, who was three-quarters out of his hole, that he should talk loudly about frightening the badgers and ask me what the hell I thought I was doing.

It took me a painful ten minutes to extricate myself with the aid of the clippers. I couldn’t go up, and I could only sink down by degrees. When at last I was standing on earth, striped all over by superficial scratches, I had to get out feet first by way of Ian’s hole.

Why the tiger should have mistrusted the obvious and expected line of approach I did not then know, but I was on the right fines when I wondered how much he had seen of naturalists and their ways. How he had come up was clear. He had very slowly and cautiously moved among the cows, never startling them but gradually shifting them down to the water. That, as Ian pointed out, was not so easy. It was another slight indication that Isaac Purvis’s gentleman really did own or farm land.

When one of the cows was squelching through the soft ground he had crossed the stream under cover of its steps and landed on a small patch at the southeast corner of the fortress which was clear of bushes and hidden from the alder. I had entirely overlooked that vital little sector of turf. Even if there had been cows in the meadow during the afternoon, I am sure that its possibilities would never have occurred to me.

Once safely across, he had waited some time to make out my outline. The whole length of the badger fortress was too long a range for a pistol at night. He may have raised and lowered it half a dozen times before deciding that he couldn’t afford the risk of missing. When I shifted my legs he thought that I was off for home and that his opportunity would be lost. So he charged in. I was at his mercy. I had no time to drop out of the tree and start running.

While we were looking for his footprints in the mud we came across a charred patch of dead bramble on the edge of the stream where the leaf dust was still smouldering. There was only one conceivable explanation of this. He had stopped for a moment in his escape to light a scrap of paper from his pocket and push it into the dry debris. It didn’t work. If he had had time and a newspaper it would have worked. The wind was right. The dead bramble and the old, dry badger bedding would have gone up and consumed the whole fortress in one roar of flame while I was still stuck in it. Such concentration of cruelty and hatred left us both shaken. I don’t think he could have been inspired to fire the bramble on the spur of the moment. I have no doubt at all that he had planned that end for me during the afternoon. A crippling, not a killing shot. Then tie my feet and heave me into the bush. Then light the debris at leisure.

“Still about, do you think?” Ian asked.

“No. He can’t tell what may be closing in ahead of him. By God, I hope the police pick him up!”

“At any rate we have enough evidence now.”

But had we? Yes, provided there were good grounds for connecting him with my suburb and the postman, and provided that German police, a day or two later, could prove his presence in Germany at the time of the three executions. Ourselves, we could not prove much. Suppose he claimed that he, too, was interested in badger setts? Suppose he apologized for disturbing us and said that for some unknown reason I seemed very nervous? He could be quite convincing if he had a good excuse for staying in the neighborhood.