Текст книги "Watcher in the Shadows "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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The pair of them waved away my thanks and apologized for stopping on the road. They reckoned I’d be glad to see them.

“We ‘aven’t give him no trouble,” protested the eldest daughter. “We’ve been ‘aving fun.”

“Aye. In the shed. I can see that,” said Jim severely. “One day you’ll get ‘urt burrowin’ in all that junk.”

“What’s the matter with the shed?” I asked.

“Knocked down a tarpaulin and bust a flowerpot.”

“Let’s go and see.”

As soon as I had Jim outside, I told him we had never been in the shed and stopped him going straight to it.

“Did you lock the door when you put the van away?”

“I did. Somebody in there, you think?”

It was most unlikely; but if the rain had driven an observer down into the shed for shelter, Jim’s sudden and dashing return would certainly have startled him. He had no time to get out of the door but he could have dived into the litter of odds and ends at the back.

“Switch the light on,” I said, “and don’t come any further. And don’t say anything which could give away what we’re doing – make out we’re looking for a handy plank.”

I did not tell him that I needed him as a witness in case I had to fire in self-defense. I knew he distrusted the box as much as the dock.

Jim switched on the light and I walked through his stores with my hand in my pocket. There was indeed a broken flowerpot on the floor, and a tarpaulin had fallen – if that wasn’t its usual place – on the top of two upright rolls of wire. Behind them was possible cover for a man, provided nobody looked for him.

“This will do the job,” I said, extracting a piece of two-by-four from a pile of loose timber.

We shut the shed and went out. And yet I felt my enemy. That is difficult to analyze. I suppose that only years of living on one’s nerves can teach the difference between imagination which is out of control and the quite dependable instinct of the hunted.

The instinct at any rate was strong enough for me to search about for some logical reason which could justify it. I asked what the stables at Woburn were like.

Jim described a Victorian farmhouse with its back facing a yard round which, on the other three sides, were stables and cowsheds with a second story of lofts over them.

“When you were leading them on to tell you about fforde-Crankshaw, where actually were you?”

“Bang under the gable with the clock in it.”

“What’s up there?”

“Nothing except rats, I’d say.”

It was a far-fetched theory; but what about that vanishing while the horse was being unsaddled? If Mr. fforde-Crankshaw were wanted by name or description, the last place the police would look for him would be the livery stables. And if he had decided to he up there for a day he could probably see and possibly overhear all visitors to the yard.

“When you were talking to the chaps there, did you give your address?”

“They knows it,” Jim replied. “Ah, but didn’t I? Bought a nice load of manure, you see. Mushroom farmers, they’ll pay anything for well-rotted stuff. Yes, they had a new man, and I told him the nearest way.”

It was working out. Mr. fforde-Crankshaw, scenting danger but partially convinced he was imagining it, must have been very tempted to check up. There had been no police inquiries, but who was Jim? What was behind his interest?

There was one grave objection to this picture of my opponent’s board. He must have calculated on leaving the stable lofts after dark. Yet he had left in broad daylight. Was that possible without being seen and inviting questions?

“What’s behind the gable with the clock in it?”

“Company director’s place it was once,” Jim said, “before he went bust and ‘ad to run for it with all the money he’d lost farming. Other side of the stables is all his fancy trees and rhododendrons.”

That too fitted. It was now worthwhile to test the only available fact which could prove my hypothesis – or, if not worthwhile, it had to be done. I told Jim to stay where he was, and I would find his missing spade for him. I would have liked to have him alongside me, but it was not a fair risk for the father of a family —even though I was pretty sure the tiger would not have returned to the sandpit from which he could no longer see anything at all.

I crawled up the slope behind the shed and put my head cautiously over the edge of the depression. The working floor of sand, some eight or nine feet beneath me, was bare and the light still good enough to distinguish any object on the flat surface. The spade was there all right.

To see anything else I should have had to go down with a torch. That was asking for trouble, since I could not know what was on the opposite side of the excavation; so I contented myself with taking a close look at the wet, packed sand within a few feet of my nose. I found fresh footmarks – of a rather pointed shoe which certainly did not belong to any of the Melton family. For the weight of the tiger it was a small foot. The tracks pointed straight downhill for the shed until they were wiped out by the furrows of my knees and forearms.

It was all very interesting, but of no immediate use. Tiger impulsively but sensibly reconnoiters Jim’s cottage from above. Finds convenient sandpit for observation post. Hunch pays off, for he hasn’t been there long before he sees me arrive. Is tempted by spade which he can approach without being seen. A bad mistake, though doubtless it would help if my body wasn’t found for a week. Shelters from rain in shed. Could easily have explained that was just what he was doing and got away with it. But his reconstruction of my unseen board is alarming. And Jim is still an enigma. So when he is nearly caught he first hides and then clears out.

“Your spade is in the sandpit,” I told Jim. “Get it in the morning.”

“Not now?”

“Not now.”

“When you went into the shed, I noticed you kept your ‘and in your pocket,” he said. “Now it’s none of my business what you got in it. And what Ferrin tells me is all lies. And me and the colonel, we don’t get on. But if you feel lonely up at the Warren, you’ve only got to say.”

I assured him that I was only going to stay there that night, and it was unlikely I should be disturbed.

“And what do you want the missus to tell Fred?” he asked.

“That nobody has made any inquiries about the rider, and that I left the Warren in a hurry.”

I gratefully accepted his offer to drive me home, and said good-by to Mrs. Melton and the children. The front seat of the hearse was luxurious. It was a remarkable vehicle. The panels all round the body, where plate glass had been, were filled in by neatly overlapping planks attached by angle brackets to the black and gold pillars, and varnished black to match. The roof was of stout canvas on bentwood ribs. It made a discreet and efficient van for shifting livestock or any of Jim’s less reputable bargains.

“Got it dirt cheap,” he said. “There ain’t no market for used ‘earses. And the bloke threw in some nice elm boards for the conversion.”

I avoided offering a silhouette against the naked electric bulbs on the cottage porch and the shed, and kept well down in my seat until we were out on the road. Yet somehow I knew that it was utterly impossible for the tiger to be about, though my mind, very tired by now, could not see on what I based this certainty.

As we drove towards Hernsholt I ran over the probabilities again and at last got at what was bothering me. If the shelterer from the rain had dived for the cover of those two rolls of wire on Jim’s sudden arrival, how had he ever got out of the shed? He had no chance of escaping under the eyes of both Mr. and Mrs. Melton and Jim had locked the door behind him. So there was something as wrong and incredible as a conjuring trick.

And then I saw it. By all that unriddling of the unintelligible I had been distracted from what was perfectly plain and obvious. I slid instantly off the front seat and fitted as much of my body as I could into the floor of the cab, putting a finger on my lips as a sign to Jim to notice nothing.

“Drive for the nearest lights and police station,” I whispered. “Don’t stop on any account! If anything happens to me, keep going!”

He looked at me in astonishment. I jerked my thumb at the shiny black boards behind the driving seat. He thought for a second and saw what I meant. There was only one place where fforde-Crankshaw could be. When he heard us coming back to the shed and unlocking the door, he had quietly taken refuge in the van. And he was still in it —with nothing but a wooden panel between me and his gun.

There was no means of covering all of myself. If he fired a burst through the partition at the level of heart and lungs he would miss; but if he aimed below where my waist ought to be he would almost certainly score on my head or shoulders. I never felt so coldly exposed. As for slowing down or stopping – that, I thought, would give him just the chance he was waiting for in order to let me have it, jump out and vanish. He was hardly likely to take action while Jim continued to bucket over country roads at a steady forty-five. The only comfort was that if he missed me I could be out of the front seat as quickly as he could drop from the double door at the back, and at last shoot to kill without fear of the law.

It was the devil of an indecisive position. Jim had turned east, and in another two or three minutes we were going to hit the A 5 road. He might be able to swing straight into the traffic stream without stopping, but we could not count on it. At that time of night there was usually a procession of lorries passing between London and the west Midlands.

It was the hearse’s horn which got us through. It had a deeply respectful note – funereal but commanding enough to make all long-distance lorry drivers jam on their brakes and curse the amateur. Jim halted for a second at the junction. He could not turn right to Bletchley, as we had intended, but he could —just – turn left for Stony Stratford, forcing a truck into the middle of the road and leaving a line of angrily winking headlights behind us. We may very well have given the impression of criminals escaping with the week’s wage packets.

“Only one lot of traffic lights now,” Jim whispered. “I’ll jump ‘em if you say so. But if you’re going to ‘and ‘im over to the police, what’s your ‘urry?”

I explained that I dared not give him a safe chance to jump out.

“How thick are those boards?” I asked.

“Thick enough to keep him in.”

“He’s only got to open the doors at the back.”

“‘E can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because there ain’t no ‘andle on the inside. Passengers don’t need it, like. Not if the coffin’s nailed down proper.”

I remember bursting into a bark of laughter, which I suppose was partly hysterical. So the tiger was as helplessly caught as if he had been a real tiger! It wouldn’t do him any good to kill. Nothing would do him any good. He was on his way to the cage or the taxidermist in a plain, black-varnished box-trap.

The line of lights on the main street of Stony Stratford was just ahead when a police car passed us, pulled across in front and signaled to Jim to stop.

Two of the cops closed in on us, one at my door and one at Jim’s. They were very evidently prepared to tell us that whatever we said was, was not. What has made British police adopt their new fashion of weary brutality? Forced on them by criminals or borrowed from alien films? At any rate I did not trust them to take my story seriously. I wanted an inspector at a desk.

At first they accused Jim of not stopping at a halt sign. When he insisted that he did stop, they dropped the effort to make him confess he didn’t and merely warned him not to take chances. It was pretty clear that the lorry driver who reported us had been a sport and had contented himself with abusing our road sense and our suspicious-looking vehicle.

While one of them examined Jim’s papers, the other ordered me to get out and open up the van.

“Open it yourself I” I said. “And stand behind the door while you do it!”

The van was empty. A flap of the canvas roof hung down, neatly cut out with a knife. The tiger had escaped without even the necessity for any acrobatics. Notches and joints on the corner posts, to which the ornate canopy had once been attached, provided easy footholds.

Either at the junction with the main road or now while the police were lecturing us he had climbed up, quietly and decisively chosen his moment and slid to the ground at the back of the van.

I looked up the road. There on the other side of it was his unmistakable figure walking fast but casually past the first of the street lamps. He waved to a bus turning out of a corner ahead. Naturally it did not wait, but that gave him an excuse to hurry. I pointed at him and may have even opened my mouth to shout “Stop him!” But my arm dropped. What was the use? How in an instant could I persuade those pompous young cops that it was I, not he, who was a law-abiding citizen?

And what charge could I bring? I had not the slightest proof that he had ever been in the van. Jim had never seen his face. I – well, all I could swear after these days and nights of anxiety at the Warren, at the badger fortress and on the road was that I had once observed him out on a quiet country walk. No, for my own safety it was wiser at this point not to reveal that I suspected him. When we met again he could no longer take me by surprise, for I had seen his face and he still did not know it.

I put no limit at all to his daring, but I could safely put a limit to his endurance since he was my own age. So when Jim at last left me at the Warren, I locked the door, relaxed and cheerfully damned the consequences. I had not been in the cottage for nearly thirty-six hours. The letter from Admiral Cunobel, to which Aunt Georgina had referred, was there waiting for me; it was a warm and genial invitation to come over and stay whenever I liked and for as long as I could.

I felt free to do so, at any rate for a week. I was determined not to involve Georgina and a stranger – even if lie had rocked my cradle – in my affairs, but it seemed improbable that my follower could soon begin again to pad along my trail. I had to be found. His careful reconnaissance had to be made.

  Hide and Seek

Next morning I telephoned to the admiral and embarked on one of those very English cross-country journeys which delight me. There is no silence which sings so noticeably in the ears as that of a remote railway junction in the middle of meadows with no village in sight when the noise of the departing train has died away.

Admiral Cunobel had chosen for his retirement a graystone Jacobean farmhouse on the southern tip of the Cotswolds, where he seemed entirely contented with village affairs and his garden. Chipping Marton struck me as a livelier spot than Hernsholt. It was linked with the world, whereas the Midland village, though not far from London, was lost in its pastures. Its first inhabitants had not merely collected together into a Saxon lump; they had built their solid, stone houses in full consciousness of geography. Go downhill on one side and you came to the Severn Estuary. Go downhill on the other and you hit the road from London to Bristol.

The admiral ran the place. He considered it his duty. Chipping Marton, on the other hand, had no use whatever for naval discipline, though it respected energy. Cunobel and his village seemed to live in a state of mutual and exasperated affection.

He drove me home from the station, gave me a drink and then took me round to the vicarage. Georgina was shelling peas in the kitchen. Nur Jehan was also in the kitchen – all fourteen hands of him, colored much as a Siamese cat except that his magnificent tail was deep cream. He breathed down the back of Georgina’s neck with heavy sentimentality.

Georgina pushed his head aside and kissed me on both cheeks, putting an unexpected warmth into her usual formal salutation.

“My dear Charles!” she exclaimed. “I do hope I didn’t alarm you.”

“Not in the least. But if you were in front of the stove instead of the sink and he butted you …”

“What I said on the telephone, I mean. I felt afterwards I might have exaggerated the situation.”

“Georgi, it could not be exaggerated,” said the admiral indignantly.

Nur Jehan, observing that our attention was engaged, took a hearty mouthful from the bowl of peas and blew the rest on the floor.

“In some ways it certainly could not,” Georgina replied. “I draw the line at that damned horse in the kitchen, and I shall have the back-door latch replaced by a mortice lock.”

“Do it myself!” said the admiral. “I’ll come down with a screwdriver tonight. But you can cope, Georgi —always could! It’s that girl I’m sorry for.”

“Which girl?” I asked him.

“Benita, his daughter. She shouldn’t have to chuck everything and come down here to the rescue every three months.”

“I have noticed, Peregrine,” said my aunt, “that long service behind the mast, or whatever it is, produces an unnatural view of women.”

“Well, my dear, you must admit that she does come down to the rescue.”

“A mere refusal to face her duty to herself, which is to make a career. Miss Gillon, Charles, very sensibly decided on a profession instead of resigning herself to becoming a namby-pamby old maid in the country. She has a gift for vulgar drawing and is employed by advertising agencies.”

“You mean a vulgar gift for drawing, Georgi.”

“I mean just what I say, Peregrine. I consider some of her drawings extremely vulgar and not at all funny. She is obsessed by desert islands. And I do wish you would not interrupt. Benita does not like London. And I am forced to the conclusion that she frequently comes down to rescue her father when he does not need rescuing at all.”

I was faintly suspicious. My aunt had never said a word about the vicar’s daughter, or perhaps she had passed so lightly over the name that I assumed it belonged to some loyal parishioner. I had been somewhat too occupied to remember the admiral’s staunch feeling for the proprieties. Since he wouldn’t put Georgina up himself because of the absence of any female relative, it stood to reason that the vicar – whom I knew to be a widower – must have the essential woman in residence.

The admiral’s vicar came in from the garden, bringing with him a lot of mud and some vague and hearty apologies. I liked him at once. He had merry eyes and an air of almost Bohemian preoccupation. I mean that his disregard for the things of this world was casual rather than saintly.

He was full of praise of my aunt, who, he said, was an excellent influence on all of them – all of them. Nur Jehan appeared to resent being included or, more probably, felt that the vicar’s pat on entering the kitchen had been insufficient. He gently nipped his owner’s shoulder.

“Pure Persian Arab,” Matthew Gillon explained to me proudly. “A parishioner of mine brought him home from Kerman where he had been vice-consul. Nur Jehan comes from the Kerman desert, and as a foal he was brought up in the family tent, which I believe is very usual. So when my friend settled here he had not the heart to keep him out of the house. I do not think he wished to. Both his boys had been killed in the war, and the stallion, I’m afraid, was all he had left to love. A lonely man. After only a year in our midst he passed away, leaving me this superb young three-year-old. So I did not like to change Nur Jehan’s habits too suddenly. Poor fellow, he deeply felt the loss of his father —his owner, I mean.”

“He is completely untrained,” Georgina said severely.

“He gets out of the glebe meadow and terrifies the village children, let alone passing motorists.”

“I’m getting on with the fences as fast as I possibly can singlehanded, Mrs. Dennim,” the vicar protested weakly. “And you yourself advised me to remember the – ah —stud fees.”

“Georgi, don’t tell me you’re encouraging him in this folly!” the admiral accused her. “And when you know very well that this wretched stallion …”

“I don’t agree at all,” Aunt Georgina interrupted. “Nur Jehan is merely a late developer whose interest has not yet been correctly aroused. As a lifelong bachelor you should sympathize.”

“But, dammit, I…”

“Valparaiso does not count, Peregrine.”

“Hell!” said the admiral, turning a deeper shade of tortoise.

“And if Mr. Gillon will only feed himself properly as well as Nur Jehan,” Georgina went on unruffled, “I see no reason why they should not be a great credit to the village. Nur Jehan is a more dignified investment than tomatoes under glass.”

“What sort of mount is he?” I asked, for everyone seemed to be hypnotized into treating the Arab as if he were a prize buck rabbit.

“Being ridden,” Georgina explained, “is one of the many duties, Charles, which Nur Jehan does not greatly enjoy. And he refuses to be ridden by a woman at all.”

I thought that most improbable – the sort of romantic nonsense which appeals to the unscientific. But who was

I to argue with Aunt Georgina on a matter of horses? I had been a horseman at the age of seventeen. The Hungarian branch of the family had seen to that. Since then I had merely used horses whenever they were available and the most convenient method of transport.

“His former owner found no difficulty,” said the vicar mildly, “nor have I.”

“Because you let him go where he likes at the pace he wants to,” Georgina answered.

I could see that nothing, not even living on porridge – if that were true —was going to separate Matthew Gillon from Nur Jehan. He not only adored the stallion, but had a reasonable and innocent hope of future profit.

“And eventually, Peregrine,” Georgina went on, “the vicar will have to employ a groom. Benita cannot be expected to come down here just to muck out the stable for him.”

“There’s profit in that, too,” I said, remembering Jim Melton and the ‘earse.

Cunobel glared at me; but before he had time to point out that, dammit, it wouldn’t pay for the straw, Benita Gillon joined us in the kitchen. I had been prepared for my own idea of a female commercial artist and I expected, I think, that she would either muck out the stable in garments altogether too colorful for the job, or else would consider that the rescue of a father justified a deal of unnecessary dirt. But I could see no London at all about her, except the fashionably lank fair hair which framed her delicately tanned face. She belonged where she was. I could well understand that she took every excuse to return to her village.

We had barely time for a few words before Aunt Georgina called the admiral and myself to attention and dismissed us. She had intended, I suspect, to parade Benita a couple of hours later when all three of them were coming over to dine, and she was not pleased at the girl’s arrival direct from the stable. She was quite wrong there. Benita grew deliciously out of her heavy Wellington boots like a graceful young tree from a pot.

The comfort of the admiral and his guests was assured by Frank – naturally a naval production too. He was cook, butler, valet and intelligence staff. Women were permitted aboard for laundry and floor-scrubbing, for the making of pies, jams, pickles and larder-stocking in general, which Frank insisted was their work. What he really wanted from them was more intimate village gossip than could be obtained in the pub.

When we came back I saw Frank whispering confidentially to his employer.

“Of course he hasn’t, boy!” Cunobel shouted – it was his habit to address anyone under sixty as “boy” – “What would he have a dinner jacket for? Wouldn’t want a boiled shirt for watching squirrels, eh?”

“Badgers,” I corrected him, not being sure whether he knew that the Hernsholt country was a most improbable haunt of the red squirrel.

“Badgers or rats,” he said oddly, “all one! He’s an old fool, that boy! When we’re alone I have to dress for dinner like one of those blazing idiots in the jungle whom

Benita draws for the sherry people. And lousy sherry it is! Pah! Knows very well I don’t dress when there are guests! Thinks I can’t move with the times!”

The dinner went very well, Georgina being on her Court of Franz Josef behavior, and the admiral and I having primed ourselves to a point of reasonable geniality before the arrival of the guests. Benita was extremely civil, insisting that she had heard so much about me from my aunt and had read my book on the squirrel. She had, too—for she told me that my description of the use of the tail in the gliding jump from branch to branch was misleading.

“Benita, my dear, Mr. Dennim is an authority,” said her father.

Her glance at me was delightful. It suggested, while preserving a proper demureness, that we were two professionals and must be patient with the unseemly interruptions of amateurs.

“This is what happens …” she said.

She borrowed a pencil from the admiral and an envelope from me. With a dozen swift strokes she caught the feathering of the hair and the angle of tail to body. I agreed at once that she was right and that I had very badly described what I had seen.

To describe Benita herself is even harder. Her true interest, so far as I can explain it, was a sort of sensual geography. She adored her own countryside, upland and valley, whatever the weather. If one imagines a tall fairy or wood nymph —not her appearance, but what would go on in her mind if she existed – then one comes somewhere near Benita.

I do not mean that she was a sort of Rima. Far from it. She was not at all a child of nature. She would have been pretty quickly bored watching squirrels. But if squirrel-watching had been a traditional hobby in the Cotswolds, she would have known all about the people who did it, why they did it and where.

Another example. One might almost call her a trained observer of grass. This undoubtedly started from the pleasure of a young and rather lonely child in feeling the soft Cotswold turf under foot, in watching the life of the valleys through the thin, waving stems on the edge of the escarpment. But it led her on to know the whole range of the grasses and the tastes of sheep and cattle.

And now I find myself describing a collector of scraps of useless information. That isn’t right either. And so I return to my romantic conception of her as a nymph – an entity carrying the collective soul of four square miles of country. I am told that this is all very pretty but that I do not understand parsons’ daughters. All the same, I cannot imagine what induced her to become a commercial artist in London. There was never the slightest chance of her becoming, as Georgina said, a namby-pamby old maid.

During the days which I spent cosseted by the admiral and his Frank, I naturally saw a good deal of Benita and recovered other memories of youth in the amateur schooling of Nur Jehan. I refused to consider the future at all. If the tiger had trusted to that speed of attack which had been so nearly successful at the cottage, he would have got me.

I do not say that I would have welcomed such an end; but I was very well aware that the loneliness of death would make less difference to me than to most of my fellows. The little world into which I had fallen was so superficially pleasant, so real to its inhabitants and yet so very unattainable by me. The remoteness which I felt was not wholly due to the twenty years between myself and Benita. I saw them all as beloved actors upon a stage which I, the single spectator in the vast, lonely auditorium, could never approach. I might have been a cripple. I suppose that in a way I was.

Aunt Georgina seemed in no hurry to return to our suburb. She was just as exasperated as Cunobel by the incompetence of the Gillons in dealing with so valuable and unexpected a legacy as Nur Jehan. On the other hand, she flatly refused to persuade the vicar to get rid of him. Dear Peregrine had appealed to her to come and make sense of the situation, and sense she was going to make even if it meant that she was housekeeper and head groom.

Sitting one evening with the admiral and myself at the companionable hour of the aperitif, she firmly pointed out that the church in ampler days had expected the Vicar of Chipping Marton to keep a horse and carriage and had provided him with a stable and a five-acre meadow. It was absurd to be content with using one as a henhouse and with raising and selling a single crop of hay from the other.

“But the wretched animal won’t stay in the stable except at night, Georgi!” Cunobel protested.

“Naturally he will not. The place still smells of chickens. We shall all take our meals there for a week, Peregrine, if we can attract him back in no other way. Nur Jehan is worth a little trouble. He is becoming known.”

“Great blood and bones, he’s a joke from Badminton to Banbury!”

“I have a very good mind to show him at the Bath and West.”

I ascribed this astonishing assertion to the influence of the admiral’s old Madeira. It was his insidious habit to compliment her on her palate. The old dear tried to surround her with an illusion that time had stood still since 1912. And he could do it. Although his means were limited, his possessions, accumulated during so many years of high command, were luxurious. The study in which we were sitting could have been that of a governor-general.

“He’ll make you ridiculous, Georgi! He’ll slide you off over his tail and then go and sit in the president’s box!”

“But they want to see him.”

“Who told you that?”

“One of the patrons of the Bath and West, Peregrine.”

“Which of ‘em? I’ll get him handed such a rocket!”

“He didn’t tell me his name, now I come to think of it. A big, dark man. Not out of his forties, I’d say, but very gray and rides all of fourteen stone. He asked me if I was Mrs. von Dennim. God knows where he got the von! Charles has never used it since he settled in England, and my husband never did. Most delightful easy manners he had! I must have met him somewhere before.”

“Can you remember where?” I asked.

“Funny you should say that, Charles! I’ve been racking my brains. I’ve seen his face somewhere. Or a brother, perhaps.”

“Shopping? Or the riding school? Or in our street?”