A Rough Shoot (4 page)

Cecily went upstairs to put the children to bed, and I gave myself a stiff gin. It did so much good that I had two more. The evening story turned out to be rather more imaginative than usual.

I was always allowed a wild twenty minutes with the children after their bath and before they were finally tucked up. This period was spent in some romp or other–suppressed by Cecily if it promised to be too exciting for sleep –or in stories. My two sons, Jerry aged seven and George aged five, had a taste, which I tried to satisfy, for improbabilities. Not fairies, but something near the shaggy dog story was what they liked. That night I started one about a nest of ants in the garden. When petrol was poured down the hole to destroy them, out they all came, saying thank-you-very-much and driving a communal car.

Cecily listened to the end of the story, and then we had supper in rather less silence than had been the custom for the last ten days. I warned her that if anyone seemed anxious to find out where I had been after dusk on the eighteenth and up to midnight on the nineteenth, she was to remember that I had been at home. And–as these people seemed clever at misusing the telephone–I suggested a code for our personal service. If I myself were on the telephone and I carried on with the ant story for the children, it meant that I was on this secret job and she must be wary. Anyone purporting to give her a message from me would also mention ants.

It was no good to worry, no good to break in any way from my routine. Routine is a powerful drug, helping a sufferer to live on condition that he accepts a slightly deadened existence. So I worked hard and regularly during the week, and took my Saturday afternoon as usual on the shoot. It was the fifth of November, two and a half weeks from the death of the unknown.

The warren was still undisturbed. So, apparently, were my nerves, for I shot a hare almost on the edge of the pit. Then I walked back the length of the down, getting nothing at all on the way, towards the stacks and richer fields at the southern end of the farm.

I was just turning into the track which led past the barn and down to the valley, when, some way ahead of me and on the other side of a gate, I saw a small, tweedy, sporty-looking man earnestly watching the long grass in front of him.

“Hi, you!” he shouted. “Stay just where you are!”

“Why?”

“Wait and see!”

He accompanied this order with a cheerful wave of his stick, and made gestures with his free hand in the direction of the field. He doubled round the angle of the hedge and disappeared.

His commanding voice had sounded thoroughly friendly, so I obeyed. Then I saw him crash through one of Blossom’s neatest fences, as if he had had a horse between his legs, and up got the partridges. He was astonishingly right in his judgment. They skimmed across my front into the turnips, and I got a quick right and left which must have looked quite showy from where he was standing.

“Thank you” I said when he came up. “How on earth did you know what they’d do on strange ground?”

“Brought up with ‘em,” he answered. “Liked ‘em for breakfast. One for me, brace for Father.”

He was a fiery-looking little bouncer, about five and a half feet high with a pointed face and a thin sandy mustache. There was a network of scars on one side of his chin, and he had a slight limp which suggested still another war wound. His age was unguessable–somewhere between forty and fifty-five. Whatever it was, he was undoubtedly fighting fit, and his movements were fast and jerky as those of a well-strung puppet.

We had a short conversation–one of those curious interchanges wherein nothing whatever is revealed but instant mutual sympathy. I found myself saying:

“I can’t offer you much sport, but if It would amuse you to join me up here any week end, I’d be delighted.”

It was a wildly impulsive offer, especially as I had every reason to be suspicious of strangers. But he was so obviously a man from whom I could learn.

“No good!” he replied. “Right eye gone. Pop in-pop out. Marble! Ever seen one?”

He handed me his right eye, and I bowed to it. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“Try a left-hand gun,” I suggested.

“Yes. Some day. But no time since the war. Where did you learn to shoot?”

“I’m a farmer’s son.”

“And what do you do now?”

“Sell stone.”

“Tombstones, ha?” he exploded joyfully. “But you look like a soldier.”

“Well, I’ve been that too.”

“What rank?”

“Lieutenant colonel of sorts.”

“Didn’t I say so? Once a colonel, always a colonel,” he decreed. “Commanded your battalion?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Staff jobs too?”

“Never!”

“Decorations?”

“Damn you, what business is it of yours?” I retorted. “Who the hell are you?”

“Me? A murderer.”

I thought I had got him placed at last. The Dorset Mental Hospital wasn’t far away, and they used to let out the less eccentric inmates for quiet country walks.

“First or second?” I asked.

“Eh? First, of course! Who wants to be a second murderer?”

“All the risk and none of the fun,” I agreed soothingly. “What did you do to your victim?”

“Shot him. Shot him in the back right here somewhere.”

“Why?”

“That’s just what I don’t know. I’ve been looking for a chap like you to tell me.”

“What do you want me to tell you?”

“Why I am supposed to have killed a man hereabouts,” he answered, staring me straight in the eyes with a flash of the sanest and grimmest humor I ever saw.

So he wasn’t a lunatic. So he knew that someone had met his death on my shoot. Was he a detective, or one of Heyne-Hassingham’s people? How much did he know, and how did he know anything at all? Was it true that he himself had been accused of firing the shot?

It was impossible to answer any of those questions, so I tried to keep my face in its same casual and friendly expression, and play for time. I decided to carry on in his own chosen atmosphere of eccentricity.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“I don’t know. There’s a lot of people I’d shoot on sight. Back or front, ha! Which of them was this?”

“But did you kill him?”

“No. Did you?”

“Do I look as if I’d shoot a man in the back?” I replied with all the indignation I could pretend.

“Yes. Don’t be a hypocrite! Never shot a German in the back? Must happen. Law of averages. Sometimes they’re coming. Sometimes they’re going. Colonel, I have watched the face of every man who visits this hilltop. You are the only one who would stick at nothing, and whose aim I’d trust–and, if I may say so, whom I’d trust myself.”

“Shall we tell your story to the police?” I asked.

“Think they’d understand it, do you, ha? I don’t!”

“Will you tell it to me, then?”

“Certainly. Let us sit down.”

“Not here,” I said.

“Why? Wind too cold, or-?”

“Or,” I answered, taking the gamble.

I led him through the gate and over onto the steep western slope of the down. A narrow sheep path twisted into the heart of one of the clumps of furze, and opened out onto a patch of turf the size of a small room. There we were safe from observation, and overlooked the lower road that wound along the stream, past Blossom’s farm, from village to village.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

“To hell with it!” he answered as if taking a sudden decision. “General of Cavalry Peter Sandorski of the Polish Army.”

“You’re in one of these resettlement camps?”

“Resettle my backside!” he replied.

“I was only wondering where you picked up English,” I explained.

“English governess.”

“She must have been an exceptional woman.”

“We had English grooms, too. Pay your penny, and take your choice.”

“Whom did you fight for?”

“Poland,” he answered drily.

“I meant–with what army after the defeat?”

“The partition,” he corrected me. “Oh, first the Russians, then the Germans. No other way of killing both, was there?”

“And you live in England?”

“Under the sky, my sympathetic colonel. Under the sky.”

Then he told me as much of his story as he thought fit for me to hear. I don’t know how many secret organizations he served when it suited him–indeed I doubt if he knew himself–but one was his own, formed by him and led by him. This private intelligence unit of his had picked up in the Western Zone of Germany an S.S. man with whom they had a seven-year-old account to settle.

Now, the real reason why Sandorski’s people–who, he insisted, were plain nonparty Polish officers and good Europeans–had kidnapped this brute was punishment, revenge, whatever you like to call it; and in due season they quietly dropped his weighted body into the Danube.

“I am a Pole, not a judge at Nuremberg,” Sandorski said to me sharply, noticing my shocked and–now I come to think of it–hypocritical expression.

Before they disposed of him, however, they interrogated him. He talked quite freely. Being a foolish and sentimental German, he didn’t think anybody would bother to kidnap and punish him for crimes he had committed seven years earlier. He assumed that these free-lance Poles had picked him up because they wanted to question him about his recent doings, and he was ready enough to answer. He probably hoped they might employ him as a professional thug. And so he confessed a story that no one had ever suspected.

He had just returned, he said, from England.

What had he been up to there? He had been flown over, he replied, for a special job, landing he didn’t know where; nor did he know–for plans had been changed–what the job was to be. Immediately after his arrival he had been given a temporary assignment–and that was to catch Sandorski with the body of a man he had murdered the previous night.

The S.S. man was asked who told him that the killer was Sandorski. He replied that the dead man had had a companion who escaped, and that the companion had said it was Sandorski. He didn’t know the name of either the dead man or his companion.

From whom, then, did he take his orders, the interrogator asked. From an Englishman, he replied, with the cover name of Pink. A former naval officer, he believed. Pink was his contact, and Pink and he had gone out together to discover what Sandorski had been doing, and to catch him if they got a chance.

Had they seen him? Yes, and chased him. But Pink had been very doubtful if it was Sandorski at all. They had only got a glimpse of his back, once bent down as he ran and once leaning over the handlebars of a bicycle. He had wrecked their motor bike and sidecar, and vanished.

“Now then,” said Peter Sandorski, cutting short his narrative, “I have friends everywhere. Even in your British Intelligence Services, when I behave myself. I asked them where, on the nineteenth of October, a motorcycle was abandoned. No driver. No claim. The answer was precise. Of military exactitude, with a map reference. So here I am. I have watched. I have listened. I think I have identified the wall which was being pulled down when Pink and his late friend interrupted the person they thought was me. Colonel, if you could tell me whom I am supposed to have killed, you would do a service to your country. I tell you that–” he jumped up among the furze bushes and stood to attention–”on my honor as an officer.”

I had no intention of confessing to him that I myself was the killer; nor, I think, did he then suspect it. He had been silently watching and weighing all the local people who could conceivably be mixed up in any sort of violent action, and had quite rightly assumed that I was the only one. Thereupon he had at once found–or forced, rather –a common sympathy.

I determined to measure out the information I would give. I had nothing to go on but liking and disapproval of him. This gallant little eccentric seemed to have a disregard for human life that was two hundred years out of date. But it could have been worse. He might have had a wholly modern disregard.

“Age about forty,” I said. “Solid build and especially broad across the hips. Dressed in a windbreaker and tweed trousers. I can’t tell you much about his coloring.”

“Height?” he asked.

“Medium. About an inch taller than you.”

“That is tall,” he insisted severely. “Nose? Chin?”

“Nose, nothing in particular. Jaw, square.”

“Can I have a look at him?”

“No.”

“Dig him up,” he suggested.

“How should I know where he is?”

“Mention of a spade. Who grabbed it on the road?”

“You did. And Pink will swear to it in court if it suits him.”

“Colonel, my governess had a word for you.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I’ve a wife and family.”

“Right! Seen it a dozen times. Just love and kisses, and a man’s a bloody hero. Give him a couple of children, and he’s got to know what he’s fighting for. Now, you’re in this, but if I’m not wrong–and when I’m talking to a born soldier I’m never wrong–I don’t believe you know what you’re in or why.”

I didn’t reply. The general’s intuition or judgment of character was far too dangerous.

“Now, how am I going to put it?” he went on. “Ever read state trials? Russia and elsewhere?”

“I used to.”

“Don’t wonder you stopped! Think the evidence is all faked, ha? Well, it isn’t. Men who confess they are guilty are guilty. What of? There we have it! Guilty of muddle. And it doesn’t take any drugs or tortures to make them confess it. Of course they are muddled. Why? Because the bosses are muddled. There’s no firm creed. That’s the thing to remember. A creed is what the leader says it is, and no more.

“That makes it easy to muscle in on the racket. Just like Hitler and Mussolini. You have to start as a socialist–that’s all–and then you have to muddle. Tell the workingman that you’re going to avoid all the errors of communism and democracy, and that you’re just going to exercise a little benevolent dictatorship until things are running properly.

“And that, Colonel my lad, is what is going on. Party here, party there, all supporting each other all over Europe. Couriers, money, beautiful agreements on paper. It’s nothing but a new fascism.”

“You’re employed by your government?” I asked.