A Rough Shoot (5 page)

“Colonel, I would be shot on sight if I set foot in Poland.”

“Then revolution ought to suit you.”

“Well, it doesn’t. Revolution would be the end of Poland. We Poles are all patriots, even the communists. We play for time. We wait for destiny. We want stability. A group of Hitlers, all jumping up simultaneously, all promising peace and plenty, where would that get you or me, ha? I tell you, there’s one of ‘em ready in every country from the Urals to Ireland.”

“Who’s ours?” I asked skeptically. “Pink?”

“Pink? These men are near the top! All of them different kinds of socialist. I don’t know yet who yours is. Might be–” and he mentioned three ministers, each of whom, certainly, was so mystically sure of his own Tightness and benevolence that he would have qualified as a budding Hitler.

“Ever heard of Robert Heyne-Hassingham?” I asked.

He had; but the name meant little to him. He only knew, through his investigations into the neo-fascist cells abroad, that there was a corresponding underground in England, and that it carried on under cover of some respectable movement.

“Or of a Colonel Hiart?”

“Hiart? Head of your Intelligence Service in during the war. What’s he doing now? Brilliant fellow but crazy with nerves. Hated firearms because they went bang. Always seeing assassins under his bed, ha?”

“The sort of chap who might imagine General Sandorski when the general was on the other side of the Channel?”

“Colonel, I order you–-I beg you, tell me what you know.”

“I know something damned odd is going on over my shoot,” I replied. “And that’s all. Where are you staying?”

“The mental hospital,” he announced with a sly pride. “My doctor is there.”

All my original doubts came back.

“Of course,” I agreed. “They are right up to date.”

He leaped to his feet in a passion, and popped down again as flat on his face as if he had just been missed by a sniper.

“Chap up there,” he said.

I raised a cautious head and peered through the furze. There was indeed a chap up there, going for a leisurely country walk. I recognized him at once as the man who had watched Blossom’s gate and bridge.

“When I say my doctor,” Sandorski hissed, “I mean my doctor before the war. If I were mad, you bloody fool, would they have made me a general?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never studied the Polish campaign.”

That went right over his head. He was much too angry. When the walker had passed us and was safely out of earshot, he told me that his prewar doctor had joined the staff of the Dorset Mental Hospital with a bunch of other highly qualified refugees from Poland and Lithuania; till he learned English, he was acting only as a superior orderly, but he had a pleasant cottage in the grounds, and there was no reason in the world why he shouldn’t have a friend to stay with him.

Sandorski’s improvisation was brilliant, and he had every right to be proud of it. The mental hospital was a self-contained world, and neither police nor Heyne-Hassingham would ever bother about its guests. One just didn’t think of it as having any. Moreover, if some interested person noticed anything eccentric in Sandorski’s behavior and chose to watch him–as easily I might myself–his disappearance into those well-kept grounds would effectively stop further inquiries.

“Can I see you there?” I asked.

“Why not? Any time you like.”

“Be there between nine and ten tomorrow.”

And I told him that he mustn’t go near my house, which might be watched. I also warned him that he might be seen by someone who knew him.

“Colonel, my lad,” he replied superbly, “you are an infantryman. When the cavalry charges, it is always likely to be seen.”

Well, that was fine when he was all alone and deliberately provoking any sort of incident that would reveal the enemy. I suggested, however, that since his dash and tactics had been so successful, the cavalry, for the moment, had better go into reserve.

“And now do something for me,” I asked. “Telephone this number, and tell my wife that Mr. Taine won’t be back till after dark, and tell her that they tried oil on the ants who complained it was the wrong grade for summer.”

He was very suspicious. After all, I had explained nothing.

“Just a father’s ruse to prove his identity,” I assured him.

I showed him a route back to the loony bin, where he would be safe from observation till he was well away from Blossom’s farm. I myself went off in the opposite direction, for I was interested by the country walker. I saw him finish his stroll along the edge of the escarpment, and vanish into a little copse at the point where the slope curved round to the east. I hurried after, keeping well under the brow of the hill where he couldn’t see me, and reached a clump of rough stuff below and outside the copse.

He was, as I expected, just within the trees–an excellent position from which he could watch the road at the bottom of the valley and the green track along the top. Once or twice he raised his field glasses to examine traffic on the road. Apart from that slight movement he was so absorbed by duty that an incautious rabbit put its head out of a bramble bush within five yards of him.

That was a wonderful chance to study his reactions. I shot the rabbit dead, and had the satisfaction of seeing him jump and drop his glasses. He didn’t make any instinctive leap for cover, however, so it was reasonably clear he had heard nothing of any acts of violence in the neighborhood.

“By Jove!” I exclaimed. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you.”

I picked up the rabbit, and smiled at him with what I hoped was an expression of innocence and concern.

“This is intolerable,” he complained. “Intolerable! Careless brutality! Have you no thought at all of the suffering you cause to harmless creatures?”

His voice was like the whine of a bagpipe, and his little feet danced to it with indignation.

“We all must eat.” I said.

“Have you not enough to eat with what the government allows you? A carefully balanced diet approved by all the statisticians? Killing for food should be left to those who can distribute economically, and understand it.”

“At least I understand it,” I replied with a grin, swinging the rabbit at him. “He didn’t suffer at all.”

“Improper!” he squalled.

“Is your objection on religious grounds?”

“Certainly not. I have no religion. My objection is that these sports of the rich, these remnants of feudalism, are antisocial.”

“But I’m not rich.”

“Then if you are not, you should set an example.”

He was a lovely little man. I didn’t want to lose him till he had told me everything he knew; so I apologized, and asked to be shown the light. He recommended several pamphlets which, I gathered, pleaded for the trap as more humane than the gun. I promised to read them. Then I asked him if he were on holiday.

“As much as I allow myself,” he replied. “I am studying the collection of essential statistics for a backward rural area

“Splendid! Who for?”

“The Workers’ Improvement Society.”

“A labor organization?”

“Certainly not! It is one of the extraparliamentary activities of the People’s Union.”

You had only to see him, to hear his limited little mind at talk, to know that he couldn’t be anything else but sincere. He was just the sort of chap who could be employed for any dirty trick with absolute confidence that he wouldn’t see it so long as he felt useful and important. I am sure I should have accepted him at face value if I hadn’t known better, and especially if I hadn’t known–for about an hour–that the People’s Union under Heyne-Hassingham was subtle and dangerous at home and abroad as the young Nazi or Communist parties.

“What are you checking up here?” I asked.

“Parallel movement, and the proportion of pedestrians and transport using a nonmetaled track in preference to a secondary road, and their reasons. I shall put down your own reason as the destruction of wild life.”

“Call it rodent control,” I answered. “What do you do with your statistics when you’ve got them?”

“A colleague of mine correlates them.”

“And anyone out for a country walk–how does he fit in?”

“I ask him firmly what he is doing,” he replied, “and explain my motives with official courtesy. If in fact he is going for a country walk, I make a note of his income bracket and description, and enter his name in the column Non-Economic Activities.”

“How long have you been at it?”

“Since October 19th.”

“Description of every person seen, ha?”

I had caught that confoundedha?from Sandorski.

“I am assured it is essential to avoid duplication.”

“Sounds as if you were being trained for the police,” I said.

He blushed, positively blushed. Blowed if I hadn’t penetrated the secret hopes that had been held out to him!

“The police are politically untrained and unreliable,” he spluttered.

It was enough. I couldn’t have kept a straight face any longer–though it was really a matter for tears that such a man could ask his silly questions and be treated with deference in our once merry England. I said good-by, renewed my apologies, and kept him under observation from a distance. I didn’t have to wait long. He marched down to the village, as importantly as the steep slope allowed.

Since listening to Sandorski I had made a pretty confident guess at what the value of my shoot was to the interested parties. Sandorski had talked quite casually of agents being flown in and out of England. The newspapers, too, often carried stories of smuggling by air, and of the difficulty of police and customs control. The down was no landing field, but there was a level strip a good third of a mile long, with a rough but well-drained surface. It was quite good enough for any aircraft with a low landing speed. I also remembered Heyne-Hassingham’s conversation with Blossom. Hadn’t he been very anxious to know that there were no sheep or cattle on the down?

It was dusk, the best time to see and not be seen. I didn’t dare to approach the angle of the hedge where the dead man had been busy with his spirit level and spiked supports. Lord knew what ingenious devices there might be to record the passage of anyone pottering about! I decided, however, that I might risk a look at the northern end of the supposed airstrip. The uninterrupted level passed diagonally across the shoot, and ended in that kaffir kraal of doomed bramble bushes from which Pink and his late thug had been coming when they surprised me.

I knew more or less where to search–where the longest possible level line from the fatal angle of the hedge intersected the southern edge of the brambles. That wasn’t so vague as it sounds, for the clumps, when you got among them, were widely separated, and there weren’t more than half a dozen on the likely line.

I found what I wanted, a bush with the interior hollowed out. The entrance was well hidden, and to be detected only by the trampled grass. A casual eye would have put the disturbance down to cows. There were plenty of them munching the short turf here on the safe side of the hedge, where they couldn’t get in the way of a whirling propeller.

Inside the bush was enough empty space for a man to kneel without getting thorns in his head or twigs down his collar. The light, which outside was fast fading, was a deep elephant gray, revealing neither outline nor perspective. I hadn’t a torch with me, so I lit match after match, placing the burnt ends carefully in my pocket. The hole had been cleaned up–so far as it was possible to clean a floor of indefinite vegetable debris–but I got my evidence: half an inch of insulated copper wire, a bit of thin broken glass that suggested a bulb or radio valve, four holes in the ground, and some filings and chips of bright metal that would have been indistinguishable in daylight, and twinkled like stars in the light of a match.

Then, pushing accidentally against the side of the hollow, I found still clearer and wholly unsuspected evidence. There was a little alcove or bay, stuffed up with dead bramble stalks. I parted them carefully and saw, driven into the ground and leveled, four supports, identical with those I had buried by the side of their owner in the rabbit warren, all ready for what they were to hold.

Now I had a picture and the beginning of a pattern; and immediately the dull weight upon my conscience vanished. Whether morally it should have done so, I doubt; for I was neither more nor less guilty than before of causing the death of a man. But from this moment on, crime assumed the amoral, inconsequent quality of a death that one has caused in war.

When I got home–after some cautious reconnaissance to ensure that nobody was interested in the time I returned –I was horrified to notice how drawn and weary my Cecily looked. She must have had that worry upon her face for a couple of weeks, and I hadn’t noticed it. It would be truer to say that I hadn’t wished to notice it. I had a wild romp with Jerry and George, and was told off by her in the normal way for exciting them before they went to bed. There was a note of relief in her half-angry protest. The house seemed to have returned to its accustomed casual happiness.

“Your friend has a nice voice,” she said to me when we were alone, “but he shouldn’t pretend to be English.”

“Good Lord, he could pass anywhere!”

“Not with women. He’s too gallant.”

“On the telephone?”

“He told me what I looked like from the way I spoke.”

“And do you?”

“I hope so,” she laughed.

Then she started to talk of our friends, flitting inconsequently from one to another. It was that sort of monologue to which a husband can go on answering hm and ah so long as he takes care to look intelligent and interested. What did I think of this one and that? And their wives? And their daughters? I tried not to show that most of them bored me, for that might have reflected upon Cecily’s ability to make them interesting–and small blame to her, for even their Maker had failed! It was only after half an hour of this that I spotted she was trying to find out–from my enthusiasm or studied carelessness–whether I wasn’t running some clandestine affair under cover of the pretended building racket.

I kept this brilliant discovery to myself, for I didn’t want to hurt her pride. If a woman has pride and joy, you cannot help loving her. I suppose they all know that, and rather wish they didn’t.