Текст книги "Watcher in the Shadows "

Автор книги: Geoffrey Household

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“Somewhere like that. But it’s just a resemblance. I’m sure it wasn’t really him.”

“I think I know the chap you mean, Aunt Georgi,” I went on, for I had to. “He must have gone white. Didn’t he have dark hair and prominent eyebrows?”

“At home?” she replied, rather puzzled. “Yes. Perhaps. But you know how one person reminds you of another.”

“Where was it that he came up to you and started talking?”

“Up above Didmarton, Charles, when I was leading Nur Jehan.”

The admiral had put down his glass and was simmering in his chair. He had even fiercer eyebrows than the false ones worn on occasion by this delightful patron of the Bath and West. My aunt, who had gone a little pale, for once looked at him more in appeal than command.

“I won’t!” Cunobel shouted. “It’s obvious why the boy is asking questions. Damn silly this silence, I call it! Blast!”

“My dear Charles,” said my aunt, recovering her usual composure, “the Dennims have always had an exasperating habit of protecting their womenfolk, and we all know very well that when you choose to carry on like a lot of knight errants polishing their boots in a heavy silence there is nothing whatever we can do about it. I will leave it at that, merely saying that I have not for one moment believed in your squirrels.”

I pretended to misunderstand. I pointed out that my observations were generally held to be accurate and my theories interesting though debatable.

“All this beating about the bush!” the admiral thundered. “You let me deal with this in my own way, Georgi! Damn it, I’m the oldest friend the boy has got, and I could tell you all about his type when I was a snotty! Your aunt means that she knows the bomb was meant for you, and that’s why you went off to your Warren!”

Quite absurd, I said. If I had thought the bomb was meant for me, I should have stayed at home under police guard instead of exposing myself in the country. And anyway what earthly motive could there be?

“Both of us know the motive as well as you do.”

“Peregrine!” my aunt appealed.

“I will not shut up, Georgi. Never heard anything like it in my life! All this devotion to each other and never going near the facts! Sacred teeth, boy, I’ve had the girl in tears!”

Georgina in tears was unthinkable. But I still did not know where I was.

“I give you my word of honor, sir, that I do not know any reason for wanting to kill me,” I said. “And if either of you do, please tell me.”

“Obviously revenge – with a past like yours!”

Georgina took command.

“When you came out of hospital, Charles, I had a talk with your Colonel Parrow. I have never mentioned it to you. We both thought it best that you should forget.”

The unthinkable was true before my eyes. She was in tears.

“My fault, Georgi!” Cunobel assured her, his bellow much muted. “I should have left it alone! But, great blood and bones, a von Dennim in the Gestapo I Isn’t there a damn thing those cloak-and-dagger boys won’t do? I’d hang the lot of them as war criminals. I saw it all when I was at the Admiralty. Bastards! Take a clean, clever boy and torture him! Damn it, the other side will only shoot him if they catch him, and honor him too! Dirty, lousy tricks they call intelligence! You’ve a right to order a man to die, but you’ve no right to do that to him.”

The admiral’s storm of sincerity was effective. I cannot analyze what had been going on in my mind. I know that I had been on the point of walking out of that unbearable house which had exposed my shame. But this protest of an honorable fighting man that the damage you did to the enemy could never excuse the damage done to an individual soul was, though eccentric for these days, extraordinarily comforting.

Oddly enough, my first impulse was to defend my service. It was Hitler’s fault, not theirs, that I had landed in the Gestapo.

“There was a right,” I said. “Perhaps not in former wars, but in the last war when the whole of our Christian civilization was at stake there was no limit to what could be asked. We sold ourselves to the devil for the sake of the faith, and it depends on the God which is within us whether we have to keep the bargain forever. And no one can help.”

As soon as I had said that, I felt it was far too dramatic and in my case untrue. I apologized to Georgina.

“How much did Ian tell you?” I asked.

“Your precious Ian,” she answered indignantly, “told me as little as he possibly could. And he wouldn’t have said that much if I hadn’t made him tell me why you refused your decoration. I also spoke a year later to the Olga Coronel whom you rescued.”

“Did you manage to convince her that I wasn’t all I seemed?”

This question, which I may have put bitterly, at once restored dear Georgina to her proper form.

“Charles, you are extraordinarily stupid in all questions of women,” she declared. “Do you really suppose that after five minutes with you she, one of the most quick and intelligent creatures I have ever come across, did not know the difference between a selfless agent risking his life under British orders and a Gestapo officer corrupt enough to take a bribe?”

She told me all that Olga Coronel had said about me; it was certainly polite. Apparently she had come over from Belgium especially to find and thank me on behalf of Catherine Dessayes and herself. But Georgina and the psychiatrists thought we had better not meet. I can’t say whether they were right or wrong. I do not know – mercifully– how much trouble I had given them.

“The trouble with you, boy,” said Cunobel, “is that because you’re not friends with yourself you think nobody else can be.”

I admitted to myself that there was an inevitable element of truth in that. In the recent agitated days I had received astonishing kindness from people who had little means of judging me beyond my face. Charles Dennim couldn’t understand it; but I suppose the young Graf von Dennim of twenty years before would have taken it as a matter of course. Had he trust in his fellow men and women, or sheer conceit?

“Now what have you been up to since that poor postman was killed?” the admiral went on. “Georgi, you’d better have some more Madeira.”

I gave them the barest facts of the story, playing it as a straight, personal investigation with practically no risk. I noticed that Cunobel twice refilled Georgina’s glass and that she was quite unaware of it.

“I see,” he said at last, with a shadow of a wink to me. “Well, you’ve done very well, and we’ll just set the police on now to establish his identity. Georgi, this has all been a great shock to you. Would you like to he down a little before you go home?”

I never admired my dear aunt so much as that moment. She rose stiffly to her feet with concentrated, masculine dignity.

“I promised his mother I would look after him and I will,” she said.

“I never knew you had seen her again after 1914!” the admiral exclaimed, carried away into a slight tactlessness by his surprise.

“It was quite unnecessary, Peregrine, for my sister to be alive in order to make her a promise.”

She swallowed a hiccup and strode dead straight for the door.

“I shall not require a rest of more than ten minutes, and I shall ring for Frank if I want anything,” she said.

When we were satisfied that she had made herself very comfortable in the bedroom next to mine and was sleeping like a child, Cunobel took me through my story again and got the truth. His brain was still as incisive as his speech, and he was right when he claimed to know my type. He made me feel like the captain of a fast cruiser just in from a successful reconnaissance.

“Got the letter from your chap in the Austrian Ministry of Justice?” he asked.

I took it from my wallet and gave it to him, warning him that it was in German.

“And what do you think assistant naval attaches were doing in Vienna before 1914?” he snorted. “They didn’t send ‘em there to learn to waltz! Your mother and Georgi found my German as comic as a music-hall turn in those days. But by the time I’d finished two wars I could have written Grand Admiral Raeder’s orders for him!”

He put on his glasses and read the letter very slowly twice.

“I thought you were running pretty close to a quibble when you said you knew no motive for killing you,” he remarked. “But I see what you mean now. Why you? Why this Sporn, Dickfuss and Weber when there were dozens of other swine as bad? And then you feel sure this fellow wasn’t in Buchenwald in your time with or without his eyebrows. Identity unknown. Motive unknown. And if it weren’t for you, face unknown too.”

“You think I was right?” I asked with some surprise, for I expected him to take the same view as Ian.

“Right? Of course you were right! I reckon German police are as good as our own, and they don’t have to pull their punches either. But he’s beaten them. I’ve got just enough faith in Scotland Yard to believe that they would get him after he killed you – especially with all your Colonel Parrow and I could tell them. But until he does, they are helpless.

“Shall we call ‘em in? Well, that’s your business, Charles. It’s your life. On your description they could certainly root out all his movements in your suburb and establish how he watched you and when. Then, of course, they’ll raid Soho and North Kensington because they always do. That won’t do ‘em much good when the man they want is so respectable he could be a chief constable himself. Still, let’s assume they do get onto the trail of the right man and are nearly ready to arrest him for the murder of the postman. Don’t tell me he wouldn’t know they were after him even before they got to the point of asking a few, polite questions! And then where is he? Gone, and waiting to have a crack at you next year!

“I’ll tell you what, boy! I think you’re wrong when you say he’s the sort of chap who might be lunching at my table in the club. He might, so far as his type goes. But in fact he can’t be well known in England. Imagine what would happen if he was! There he is, traveling back and forth to Woburn and prowling round your district. Now, if he had a lot of friends, he’d run into one. ‘Good God, Dick, what’s happened to your hair and eyebrows? Changed your barber?’ And then it’s all over the place in no time. See what I mean?”

He was undoubtedly right. So we had a convincing picture of a man who knew England inside out, but had very few friends here – or, possibly, had not been in the country for so many years that his friends would not easily recognize him.

“Wild guess, Charles!” he went on. “No good taking it to the police! They want facts, like you scientists, not intelligent conjecture. But one can’t win a war that way – not even your private one. All one ever knows of the enemy is conjecture.”

I said that the speed and accuracy of conjecture on the opposite side were more like second sight. I could not understand how he had managed to trace me and begin reconnaissance all within eight days.

“Of course not! A man can’t see the wood for the trees when he’s sweating with panic. Didn’t you say your Isaac Purvis spotted him on the way back from the badgers to the Long Down and that his course would take him past your cottage? Well, where was my letter to you?”

“On the floor of the passage inside the front door.”

“Plenty of time to steam it open with you stuck in a bramble bush!”

I doubted that. He had not plenty of time – five or ten minutes at the most, and those he would have used to prowl around the cottage and make sure it was empty and unwatched, not to steam letters open. It was not in his character to take unnecessary risks.

Otherwise Cunobel was right. The envelope of his letter had looked a bit untidy, which might have aroused my suspicions if I had known his passion for neatness as well as I knew it now. The visitor had simply raised the flap of the envelope with a sharp knife and stuck it up again. If he had made a mess of the job, he would merely have walked off with the letter and I should have been none the wiser.

I asked Cunobel for his frank advice —as my eldest friend, which I really began to feel he was.

“How are your nerves?” he grunted.

I replied that they seemed to be all right, but were evidently affecting my alertness.

“Sleeping well?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ever occurred to you that you’re doing a public service?”

I wasn’t going to admit that I had once been in a state of driveling terror while walking along a harmless road and had comforted myself with that very thought.

“Well, you are. How many other mistakes has he made, besides that poor postman, which we don’t know about? It’s a bad business, boy. I had a nasty case when I was at the Admiralty. Anonymous letters from a poor devil telling us to make our peace with God because it was his duty to shoot us all. He turned out to be a retired commander who was crazy as a coot and never showed any other sign of it. Special Branch had the hell of a time running him to earth.

“I remember what the assistant commissioner told me. Political assassins – all in a day’s work! Criminal lunatics – bothering, but they reckon to pick ‘em up! What’s a fair nightmare to them is the potential murderer who isn’t a political, doesn’t mix with criminals, doesn’t show any eccentricities. Get at his grievance, and you’ll get his identity! But if you haven’t a clue to his motive and he’s cunning, he’ll tie up a considerable force of men on plain guard duties.

“Now, in a case like yours I think Special Branch would try to trap their man. Use a decoy. In fact do just what you are doing. But they’d never allow it without a copper up every tree. Your method is better, but I don’t like it. You go on staying with me, Charles. He can’t do very much while you’re here. Let’s sit quiet and see if he makes a mistake!”

That was true enough. At Chipping Marton I was seldom alone, and there was no regularity in my movements. That patron of the Bath and West could only watch. He had little chance of attack without being seen. So long as I remained with the admiral, our game was adjourned for refreshments and I could rest.

But rest is in the mind. There was no feeling it. And this was the more exasperating because I knew that for the first time in twenty years I had all the ingredients of happiness. There was a new, dear warmth between Georgina and myself. There was the training of Nur Jehan. There was my delight in the child, Benita – a desolate delight, for I had to emphasize to myself that she was, compared to a man of forty-three, a child. And all this ruined because I could not move without a degrading .22 pistol in my pocket!

Benita had little interest in horses. She could ride, of course. The local pony club had seen to that before she was twelve – leaving her at the same time with a lasting dislike of the revivalist religion of the horse and its female pastors. Aunt Georgina, with her matter-of-fact nineteenth-century attitude, had been an exception. Georgina shrugged her shoulders at enthusiasm and simply laid down the law that a person of sense should know exactly what was going on in his or her stables just as the modern car driver ought to (but doesn’t) know enough to give precise orders to his garage.

So in the country Benita walked. In London, I gathered, never. I could not avoid these casual strolls without inexplicable surliness, and I did not want to. But she very soon spotted my preference for the open, windswept tops of the Cots wolds.

She put down my manner to a curious life and a dangerous war. Georgina had told her that much. Whether she thought I needed an exorcist or a psychiatrist I was not sure, and I don’t think she was.

One afternoon she said to me quietly:

“There is nothing behind you, Charles.”

I had looked back twice when passing along the bottom of a dry valley. The steep sides were clothed with patches of gorse, intersected by runways of silent turf. It was easy to come down from the top in short rushes quite unseen, until the range had closed to ten yards and that intent, dark face was smiling at my back. What went on ahead of me I did not care. The birds would give me warning.

I apologized for my restlessness.

“But you look as if you really expected something,” she said.

“A naturalist always does. The watcher begins to resemble the watched.”

“Are animals afraid all the time?”

I answered that I did not think so – not in our sense of the word anyway – but that fear was never far from the surface, was acceptable and might even be enjoyable. Everything which preserves must in theory be enjoyable: mating, the satisfaction of hunger and the feeding of the young. A hare, for example, obviously triumphs in a narrow escape; you can see self-confidence in the easy gallop. Extreme danger is pleasurable to a few soldiers – even civilized, sensitive soldiers. And aren’t there young idiots in America who drive cars at each other down the center of the road to see who will get out of the way first?

“All the time, all around us,” I said, “Death is making his reconnaissance.”

“But it’s life which you are afraid of,” Benita replied.

“Because I look behind me?” I laughed.

She accepted that as just an unconscious gesture. I behaved as if I were haunted, she said, only because I was continually looking back into my life instead of forward. There was enough truth in the accusation for me to accept it without awkwardness.

But God knew the haunting was real enough! I had always the impression that I was being watched, though I now believe that at the moment I was not. Physically, that is. Death was at his headquarters, collecting the intelligence reports.

Only Benita saw anything wrong with me; her father did not. There was no reason why he should. The link between us —all the link I was admitting – was Nur Jehan. Since the horse fought Georgina and Benita, and Gillon when on his back was too indulgent, only I could begin to school him.

It was never fair to call the vicar impractical. What he lacked was capital, not common sense. He was a most lovable man, unaffected, fully able to hold the respect of his parishioners outside the church and their attention within it. His only worry —a severe worry —was Chipping Marton vicarage, which he could not even keep in proper repair. He was rightly determined that at least the garden should bring in an income to pay for the house.

“My dear Dennim,” he said to me once, “you are a man of the world. You would probably agree that I should be fully justified in turning the vicarage into a guesthouse or in using my leisure, such as it is, to practice some harmless form of commerce or home industry.”

I did not agree —and since I knew that he didn’t either, I said so.

“The limit of the permissible,” he went on. “Yes, one soon arrives at it. Two hundred years ago the Vicar of Chipping Marton worked the land and fed his family. We clergy of today have not the time and probably not the skill. Yet to produce, to make grow, to create – that much I feel is allowable to a servant of the Creator. I have given my spare time to specialties with some success. You will find Gloxinia Rev. Matthew Gillon in most nurserymen’s catalogues, though I doubt if I made fifty pounds out of it. I grew tomatoes and strawberries for seed. Admiral Cunobel was unconvinced, but I was able materially to assist Benita in London until it appeared that the varieties which had been recommended to me were very subject to disease. I feel that Nur Jehan is in that category of innocent creation which I permit myself. My conscience insists that to keep so beautiful an animal at stud is a valuable service to the community.”

The real trouble was that Gillon never saw or couldn’t afford to see that capital was essential to consolidate the results of his industry. But, granted a run of luck, it might not have been. The admiral, though ribald, had never discouraged his parson until the arrival of Nur Jehan. At least strawberries and tomatoes could not career down the village street looking for affection, or roll luxuriously in an angry neighbor’s uncut hay.

Matthew Gillon was unnecessarily grateful and always very conscious that I might be sacrificing my interests to his affairs. He made a point of collecting nature notes from his parishioners in case they might be of use to me, and he pressed his daughter, who was very properly inarticulate about everything she really valued, to show me the secret places of her childhood.

Benita, however, rather resented my profession, since she ascribed to it the sudden fits of distraction which interrupted conversation. In any case she wasn’t interested in causes, only in effects. If you can catch with your pencil the essential mechanics of a bird’s wing and the subtle change of shading which marks on an open down the transition from one grass to another, mere words are dull and the microscope irrelevant.

She did sometimes condescend to pass on facts in the sort of voice which you would expect from a nymph surprised by a zoologist in dark glasses. One afternoon when her father and I were mucking out the stable and she was soaping leather, she remarked:

“There are squirrels in the Wen Acre Plantation if you want to watch them.”

The plantation was of mixed conifers and beech at the head of the dry valley where Benita and I had walked – an early and most successful experiment of the Forestry Commission which belonged to its countryside as honestly as any other Cotswold wood. It deserved to lose its artificial name and be called the Wen Acre Hanger.

“How blind we are!” Gillon exclaimed. “I have driven along that road once a week for eight years.”

I suggested that he was not likely to see squirrels from a car when passing along the upper end of the plantation.

“And anyway, Daddy,” Benita added, “they weren’t there last summer.”

“Weren’t they indeed? Well, the little imps have found the perfect home. Bless me, I haven’t seen a red squirrel since before the war! I shall certainly stop when I pass tomorrow.”

When I saw him the following evening he was full of triumph and humility. He had started early for the weekly visit to a bedridden old shepherd which took him past the top of the plantation, and had spent an hour wandering under the trees.

“Three I saw for certain,” he announced, “and I believe there were four. I thought I had found the dray, too, though on the way home I had to admit to myself that it was an old magpie’s nest.”

He told us how he had stayed perfectly still for twenty minutes —the amateur always feels that anything over ten is a marvel of patience – and that one of the squirrels had actually come close to his feet, trustful as a gray squirrel in a park.

“I ventured greatly,” he went on. “I offered a piece of biscuit. It took it in its paws and ate it, looking at me all the time. I – I was amazed! And flattered! Do you feel, Dennim, that I was justified?”

“Oh, Daddy, it was somebody’s pet!” said Benita.

It must, of course, have been a squirrel brought up by human hands and then turned loose. But I did not want to spoil the vicar’s vision of himself as a humble disciple of St. Francis. In any case he had every right to pride himself on moving cautiously and giving an impression of saintly harmlessness. It does not take long for a tame animal to become as wild as its companions.

I could not resist going up to have a look at the squirrels myself. I went alone, for it would have been impossible to explain to Benita why I took such care to avoid cover till I knew it was empty. There were four of them, fine little beasts with rather darker tails than usual.

I could not find the two drays any more than the vicar. Normally that would have been a challenge and I should have spent a couple of weeks on verifying what the family life of the two pairs really was. But I was impatient. My time was fully taken up. Nur Jehan had just begun to answer his helm, as the admiral put it, by pressure of legs alone.

I saw little of my host except at dinner, for his local dictatorship extended beyond his own village and vicar, and he kept himself busy with all the usual bumbling committees, where he was dreaded for his outspokenness, but indispensable. He considered it a duty of hospitality to preserve his guests from the teas and luncheons which accompanied these activities, so that I was surprised when he told me that I had been especially included in an invitation from General Sir Thomas Pamellor.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“The county’s prize pongo,” said the admiral. “Lives just the other side of Cirencester. But he’ll give you the best lunch outside London if you can stand him.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“Matter with him is that he’s a bore, boy! Good God, when Thomas retired they had to call in extra police to control the celebrations in Whitehall! It had got so bad that if you had a position of any responsibility in this country you couldn’t talk to a visiting Frenchman without Thomas dropping in beforehand to tell you what you oughtn’t to say. Hell’s bells, if there’s anything we and the French don’t know about each other after a thousand years of fun and games, that ass Thomas is the last person to spot it! But his cook, boy! Mustn’t miss that! A pity we can’t take Frank with us. He might pick up a hint or two.”

General Sir Thomas Pamellor at once reminded me of a fine freshly caught shrimp. Not that he was small, but he sprouted hair at odd angles from eyebrows and mustache, and his coloring was exactly the right mixture of sand and gray. Lady Pamellor was a slightly smaller shrimp, but cooked. She was bright pink and had a good deal of pink in her dress. She gazed at her still-living companion with admiration. There was not much else she could do, for Sir Thomas never stopped giving us extracts from his unwritten memoirs throughout six courses.

“Frankly, I never knew a Frenchman I couldn’t get on with,” said Pamellor. “I was only a colonel then, but whenever and wherever there was trouble with the French, Churchill gave the same order: Turn Pamellor loose on ‘em!”

“Very right!” the admiral agreed naughtily. “You’re the last person they would suspect of playing a deep game.”

“Exactly, Cunobel! A simple soldier and simple liaison. You can’t have too much of it. Now then, mon vieux, I used to say, here’s British policy! And I’d tell him. Here’s French policy! And I’d tell him that, too. Then all we had to do was to go our own way and make the thing work.”

“He speaks such very beautiful French,” said Lady Pamellor, making her sole contribution to the conversation.

And on he went.

“Just tell me what you want, I said to de Gaulle, and I’ll see that Churchill falls in with it. So far as he can, of course, so far as he can! Our own army, that was the trouble. I remember one of our very high commanders. I won’t mention his name. ‘Any more from you,’ I said, ‘and I’ll send a signal straight to the Cabinet.’”

“And did you?” Cunobel asked.

“God bless my soul, yes! I was always sending signals direct to the Cabinet. I remember a major of the Deuxieme Bureau, when I was in Paris after the war, warning me that they had copies of all of them.”

“Broke your cipher, you mean?”

The admiral choked, and did his best to pretend that a truffle had gone the wrong way.

“Good Lord, no I My little secretary had been pinching the en clair drafts from the wastepaper basket. ‘Never mind!’ I said to the major. ‘There’s nothing I tell my government that I am not prepared to tell yours.’ A pity that I hadn’t more influence on policy! I could have made us just a band of brothers.”

When Lady Pamellor had swum delicately off and hidden herself beneath the rocks of the drawing room, Sir Thomas pressed cigars upon us and one of the finest brandies I have ever tasted. I can well imagine the French putting out a legend that they found him useful.

“I hear you’ve been in a spot of trouble, Dennim,” he said.

I instantly joined the odd thousand Europeans who must have thought it wise to impress Sir Thomas with their sincerity.

“Trouble?” I asked, puzzled. “No.”

“Bomb, eh?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Shall we say I read it in the paper?” replied the general with heavy diplomacy.

Cunobel was magnificent.

“Damned Cypriots!” he exclaimed. “Didn’t leave that kind of thing to the army when I was a boy! Sent a cruiser, gave ‘em a party and showed ‘em over the gun turrets!”

“Cypriots?” Sir Thomas asked. “They didn’t tell me you had been in Cyprus.”

“I’ve been in a lot of places, my dear general,” I said mysteriously. “Now which particular they are you referring to?”

He was a little taken aback. He had evidently thought this was going to be a straightforward job where the renowned Pamellor frankness would be effective.

“There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you,” he said. “I’ve been directly approached by French police. They want to know if you can give any description at all of the man who sent the bomb.”

“No, I can’t,” I answered. “And, anyway, Scotland Yard knows all I know. But how did the Surete find out that I was staying somewhere near you?”

“I don’t know. I suppose Scotland Yard told them that much but wouldn’t tell them any more. Hidebound! I could recommend them half a dozen first-rate fellows who would improve liaison with the Surete out of recognition. But there it is! They are up against British mistrust all the time! So what more natural than to appeal to me? Our good friend Pamellor, somebody says, hides himself in his little gentilhommiere at a few kilometers from Chipping Marton. Lui, il fera notre affaire!”

“I do wish I could help a bit more,” I said heartily. “But, to tell you the honest truth, I am not even sure that the bomb which killed our postman was meant for me.

“I may pass that on, Dennim?”

“Of course. Was the inquiry from Paris?”

“From the very top. But it’s quite likely they were passing on an unofficial inquiry from one of the departments. We old comrades of the Resistance, we serve each other without questions.”

We retired to the drawing room for coffee, where the admiral discussed with Lady Pamellor some fussy problem of the Girl Guides and the grammar school, while I was lectured by Sir Thomas on the blindness of the Foreign Office. When at last we got away, Cunobel’s driving expressed his feelings. He roared down a mile of straight road, screeched round two corners and stopped.