A Rough Shoot (6 page)

In the morning–much to her annoyance on a Sunday– I had business between nine and ten. I called on Sandorski, and found him in a turtle-neck sweater glowing with foxy health, after, no doubt, some crazily strenuous daily dozen and a hearty lunatic’s breakfast. His host, the doctor, having been on night duty, was asleep.

“My shoot,” I told him, “is a landing ground. They mean to put movable radio beacons at both ends of the strip. When you shot that friend of yours he was arranging an emplacement for the southern beacon. The strip has not yet been used, but it’s going to be. It’s high ground clear of obstructions, remote, level, and the landowner is in this up to the neck.”

“It won’t be used,” he answered, “because they know somebody found them out.”

“Nobody found them out. They have been wondering whether I mightn’t be guilty. If it wasn’t me, it could be a poacher.”

I decided to trust him. It was pointless to go on mystifying a wholehearted ally who had hidden little or nothing from me. I told him how the accident really happened. He guffawed at my words of regret.

“Lord!” he yelled. “I once did the same thing to my uncle! Lord! We both had our breakfast off the mantelpiece for a week!”

Then he bounced about like a little boy with an urgent need, shouting:

“Air pistol! Air pistol! Air pistol!”

“Mean anything to you?”

“Riemann! That’s the man you shot. Colonel, my lad! If Riemann has had it, you’ve done me a favor. Now, whom was he with?”

“Your Colonel Hiart,” I replied, “if it’s the same colonel you knew. Tall, thin, sunburnt, dark. Very sensitive and intelligent face. Can stand still indefinitely, which most people can’t. And likely to know that Peter Sandorski was after his companion.”

“That’s him! No soldier–never was! But knows everything! Guesses what I’m working on. Guesses I might catch up with Riemann any day. General of Cavalry–that would frighten him, ha? Second sight, but a bloody pansy–” and he went into details.

“But you grant him a flair?”

“Cleverest man in Europe, when he isn’t too scared to think.”

“Right! Now, suppose he went over the ground in daylight, there must have been plenty of evidence for a trained eye. I don’t believe I ever picked up the empty cartridge. And when he’d pulled himself together, he might remember the difference of sound between a gun and a rifle. Damn it, he’s a soldier, and he must have heard plenty of both, even if he doesn’t like ‘em! And wouldn’t he check up where you were at the time? It’s a fair old puzzle, but he ought to know the death or disappearance of Riemann had nothing to do with the airstrip.”

“Hiart, ha?” he answered, as if the man’s reactions were not to be judged by ordinary standards. “You or a poacher at eighty yards? It might occur to him. But he wouldn’t rule out straight revenge on Riemann. And I don’t think they’ll use the airstrip.”

“Then why have they put back the supports for the beacon?”

“How do you know they ever took ‘em away?”

“Because they’d have taken a horrid risk if they didn’t and because I’ve seen the four holes where the spikes were before. That’s what Pink and your S.S. man were doing just before they nearly caught me–pulling up the supports and hiding them somewhere.”

He snorted agreement.

“Who’s employing Hiart?” he asked.

I gave him a picture of Heyne-Hassingham and a lecture on the People’s Union, bringing in the earnest statistician as an example. It all fitted–an organization at bottom hysterical, but in practice efficient, impudent and with an appeal to the ruthless idealist.

“The rest, during the week, is up to you, General,” I said, “because I have to earn my living. What we want to know is when those beacons go into position. And I’ll tell you what time to watch. Not in daylight because there are too many people about. Not at night because they won’t want to show a lot of artificial light. But at dusk, after the farm laborers have gone home. And I think they’ll also want to be sure that I am in my office and not taking an afternoon off.”

“And what then?”

“We go to the police, I suppose.”

“Any evidence?”

“The beacons.”

“Colonel, my lad,” he smiled, “just work it out! What will the police do? Send up a couple of constables to check your story. Somebody will see ‘em or hear ‘em, and that’s the end of the airstrip.

“What’s the next move, ha? Anonymous information to the police that Colonel Taine may be using his shoot as a little private Garden of Remembrance. With all the details. You try and deny ‘em. Especially if they say you bumped him off on the nineteenth, when the motorcycle was found, not the eighteenth. Where’s your alibi? What’s your story? People’s Union? You must be a political maniac. Heyne-Hassingham and Hiart? Above suspicion! Where did you put that body, by the way?”

“Where it will take a lot of finding,” I answered sulkily.

“Think so? I’ve had some experience. So has Scotland Yard. I’ll tell you the alternatives. Under the manure heap in the barn. In the middle of a bush–but unless you were in a tearing hurry, we’ll rule that out. Any heap of stones. Or the pit where the dead sheep are. Ha? Ha, pokerface? Now, you leave it all to me.”

Sandorski pointed out that for a job of this kind–and he said he had organized enough of them to know–an aircraft had to have a fairly respectable base and a reason for leaving it. Therefore it would take off in daylight. Therefore it would arrive before midnight. And if it were going to land within five hundred yards of a road, the organizers must be sure of a dark night with no moon. That gave Wednesday, Thursday or Friday as the most likely dates. He didn’t think they would risk leaving the beacons in position; they would bring them out to the field on the night the plane was expected. I was just, he repeated, to leave it to him.

I did so, with some misgivings on the Polish Cavalry’s conception of intelligence work. Colonel Hiart, with his extreme caution, seemed a more desirable model. We agreed that Sandorski would telephone me at my home if the beacons were put up, and that I would join him within an hour at the haystacks above Blossom’s farmhouse–a rendezvous which both of use felt certain we could reach in darkness without being observed. Just in case they had a man to spare for watching my door, I said I would go out at the back and walk across the hills to the shoot.

On the Wednesday, soon after I returned to the office from lunch, I had a telephone call from someone who sounded like a harassed and indecisive farmer and asked me if I would be in at five as he wished to consult me about new types of porous flooring for poultry runs. He seemed to be in a great hurry and rang off without giving his name. When nobody turned up at five, it occurred to me that the caller intended to find out whether I should be safely in my office at dusk. It was a very useful warning that something might happen. I prepared the way for plenty of free time by telling my clerk that I felt rotten and thought I might be starting a go of flu.

I went home in a curious mood of high hopes and misgivings. It’s no good to deny it. A family man, however contented, does like a bit of excitement if he’s ever been used to any.

About seven my telephone rang and I jumped to it. Cecily, who always answers the telephone (since nine tenths of the calls are for her), gave me a startled smile. She had convinced herself, I think, that the building materials racket was over.

“All set to go,” said Sandorski’s voice. “How are the ants? Here’s a horn for their car!”

And he blew a colossal raspberry that must have nearly wrecked the diaphragm of my telephone.

“Have you a pistol?” he asked.

I replied that I hadn’t. As a matter of fact I had. I didn’t want to part with an old wartime friend, though to retain it was downright illegal. But I did not want to put myself into temptation. I had enough trouble as it was.

I warned Cecily that if anyone called or telephoned she was to say I had gone to bed with a touch of flu and was asleep.

“Darling, don’t forget there are three of us who depend on you,” she said.

I told her I never thought of anything else.

I slipped out of the back door, crossed the meadows and waded the stream. As the crow flies the distance to Blossom’s farm wasn’t more than three miles, but the crow didn’t make Dorset footpaths, and I had to step out smartly to reach the haystacks in an hour.

It was a blustery evening with a few fierce showers and comparative calm between. The weather report was of strong winds over the North Sea, rising at times to gale force. With us it was a good enough night for a clandestine landing, but I didn’t think it would appear so at the point of departure.

After crossing a steep little green range, I sploshed down a muddy cart track and hit the lower road south of Blossom’s house. I hoped that the statistician was there in the rain, taking a census of laborers returning from the village pub. Then I turned off into a dry valley which led up to the back of the shoot. My feet on the turf made no sound. It was very dark, and a solid object could only be distinguished thirty yards away. I knew that I couldn’t be observed or followed.

I arrived at the stacks silently and on the hour. I couldn’t see Sandorski, and he gave me the worst fright of the evening when he spoke from the level of my feet. He was lying on an old tarpaulin, which I had already touched to be sure that tarpaulin it was, and absolutely invisible.

He told me that the beacons had been set up at dusk, just as I had prophesied; they were, he thought, of transpontor type, and each had been easily carried by two men. All this he had seen from the top of a beech in the boundary hedge, where he had been on watch every afternoon and evening. After it was darkish, he had heard the party going back to the upper road. Thereupon he trotted down to the village to telephone me.

“Any plan?” I asked.

“Not yet. What are we up against? Don’t know!”

We took position not far from the southern beacon. About nine we heard their footsteps. They must have moved very quietly as far as the boundary hedge. Then they had to cross a strip of plowland strewn with large flints. I had never discovered a way of walking silently over those flints, nor did they.

So far as we could tell, they crossed the plowland and settled down somewhere on the edge of the grass. Since I knew every foot of the surface and Sandorski did not, I left him in our hiding place and explored, stopping frequently to listen. I spotted them first by the flare of a match. They felt confident enough to smoke. I crawled over the turf till I was within twenty yards of them. They were still a party of four. In the glow of the cigarette ends I felt pretty certain that I recognized Hiart.

Their voices were low, and I could only distinguish a few sentences in the hush between the passing gusts of wind. I should have said the hush was complete, but, when one tried to listen, there were smaller breezes playing through the dead thistle stalks, or the flap of their mackintoshes, or, just as a whisper was giving the clue to previous half-guessed words, the tiny crepitation of insect or field mouse close to my ear. I gathered, at any rate, that the plane was starting from Austria, that it would refuel in

France on the return journey, and that they too thought it wouldn’t come. They were prepared to wait for it again on the following night.

I returned to the general with my news. We sat where we were, and about an hour before midnight someone came to the beacon and presumably switched off the battery. He didn’t go through the gap in the boundary hedge and off to the road, but back to rejoin the rest of his party on the down. Sandorski leaped at the opportunity to get away before them, see what was the number of their car and whether there was anyone waiting in it.

It was too bold, even on so dark a night, for after we passed the gap they weren’t more than a hundred yards behind us. We silently increased our lead and then, finding no car at all at the junction of the track and the upper road, dropped into the ditch and let them pass us. We trailed them at a reasonable distance–at least it seemed reasonable to Sandorski–and discovered that they had left their car half a mile down the road, just up a little metaled track which ran through a patch of woodland. When they drove away, there were still only four men in the car, so we knew that it had been left unguarded. The People’s Union, for all its thousands of innocent enthusiasts, seemed to be a bit short of manpower for a job of this delicacy.

I slept deeply and late, foreseeing that the next night I might have little chance, and at my office pretended to be bravely carrying on in spite of that incipient flu. My clerk was sympathetic. It may seem unnecessarily grand for a plain salesman to boast a clerk–but we had a few big contracts, and I needed someone to sit within reach of the telephone when I was out. The job suited him. He was over sixty, reliable and fatherly. He said that my eyes were altogether too clear and bright, and that I looked like an aunt of his just before she died. It might, I thought, well be so. I’ve seen plenty of men whose eyes were clear and bright just before they died. Only they didn’t know they were going to.

His confounded aunt put ideas into my head. I wrote down for Cecily a short account of what had happened, sealed it up, and took the envelope round to the bank. I didn’t feel the office safe was secure enough.

In the evening I played with the boys, and ate an early supper. I told Cecily that I had to go out, and that I hoped this would be the last night of the investigation. She didn’t know quite what to make of my mood, for I was in good spirits. It seemed to me more and more unlikely that I should ever be in the dock for manslaughter. Anything else that was coming to me I could handle.

Soon after half-past seven I was with Sandorski, tucked into the hedge above the southern beacon. An hour later the party arrived, and stood quite close to us while they checked and switched on the beacon. Pink and Hiart we recognized beyond doubt. The other two were unknown to either of us. They were not as careful as they had been the night before. Growing familiarity with the job, perhaps. And really there was no reason why they should be careful. It was a million to one against anybody being out of doors on the open ground of Blossom’s and the adjoining farm.