A Rough Shoot (8 page)

I hoped that Sandorski might be close behind Hiart, but he was not. I waited and waited, feeling all the time that we might be within a few yards of each other, and each afraid to break the silence. I needn’t have worried. When Sandorski did come, it was boldly down the track, and singing in a low, but not nearly low enough voice some preposterous chorus:

One day in October I wasn’t so sober.

“For the Lord’s sake!” I protested. “English folk song,” he answered. “Learned it from my governess. They’re miles away and busy. Have a cigarette!”

“Where are they?”

“Looking for the beacons, all four of them.”

“That won’t take them long.”

“Won’t it, ha? One is halfway down the hill, and the other on its side under a pile of cabbage.”

“Kale.”

“Well, whatever damned kraut you feed to cows in this country. Next thing, Colonel, my lad, is to restore your temper.”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Our friend under the daisies. Dig him up, and you’re a free man.”

Even in the midst of this excitement I wasn’t very ready to give away the place. So long as I kept my precious secret to myself, it was secure.

“You bloody fool!” he said. “Now’s your chance to do what you ought to have done the first time. Burn their car and burn him in it. They’ll think the corpse is Lex. That’ll keep Hiart quiet! That’ll make him stay at home. Suspicion? Nonsense! Why you? Life’s wide open to inspection. Decent bourgeois selling tombstones. No connection whatever with Poles and such. Continent isolated, ha?”

It did look, I must admit, as if I were on to a good thing. I led Sandorski to the rabbit warren. It was a little close to the hedge where the beacon lay under its pile of kale, but Hiart’s party were at the far end of the down still searching for the other.

At the bottom of the pit we could safely use a torch. We dug him out with our hands, and I left him to Sandorski for I didn’t want to look. I smoothed back the earth and arranged the fallen thorn in its old position.

Sandorski flashed his light on what had been the face. It didn’t tell him anything but the common fate of man. He looked further, and found a tattoo mark on the right arm and a locket or identity disk on a light chain round the neck. He took it and put it in his pocket.

“So that is the end of Riemann,” he said.

It was he who had the courage to deal with the corpse, he who was glad to see the man dead. Yet there was a sob in his voice.

“What had he done?” I asked.

“Despaired. Wanted a short cut and thought we were too patient. Went over to these people and broke open my organization, for I had trusted him. Not for money and not for country, but just because he thought they were the saviors of the future. Taine, I find myself against every kind of idealism.”

It was a terrible confession to cry out, but, in this world of passionately sincere political creeds, it was true. He was in opposition to them all. Yet he had an ideal, and it was Christendom, the holy and forgotten unity of Europe. Only in such a Europe, where politics were seen to be a mere expedient compared to the beauty of the common heritage, could his people live.

He took out a knife and removed all traces of lead pellets from the body. I could see none, but we had to expect the microscopes of a police laboratory. Then he pulled the leg of the beacon from Riemann’s heart, and buried it again.

“Hang onto his heels,” he said.

We trotted along the boundary hedge to the gap, and when we reached the upper road followed it down to the patch of woodland where they had left their car the previous night. We took to the ditch once when the headlights of a lorry, climbing the hill, swept and wavered through the sky. Otherwise we didn’t see a sign of man.

The car was again unguarded. Hiart must have been very nervous about it, but he had no reason to suppose we knew where it was. And in any case he couldn’t spare a man.

We wrenched off the main petrol lead, bent it and soaked Riemann and the floor mats. Then we put him in the driving seat, and Sandorski threw a lighted cigarette into the pool of petrol beneath the car. The result was spectacular. We were only just far enough away.

We cleared out, back along the hard road where our footprints wouldn’t show, then over a wire fence onto firm grass and so across country to Blossom’s land, which we hit near his hilltop barn. The glare lit up our eastern horizon. I don’t know what the party at the northern end of the down did when they saw it. I would have liked to hear Pink’s remarks to Hiart on the subject of wasting time over useless precautions.

The suitcase was recovered without difficulty. Lex, however, was not. I could have sworn that I knew where I put him! but every time I went confidently up to him, he either got up and turned out to be a sheep, or lay still and was a patch of dead weeds. There was no time to lose, for we had to be out of the neighborhood before police got busy on the down and the two roads–and very busy they would be.

“We’ll have to leave him,” I insisted at last. “What does he know?”

“Enough to recognize us both, and swear to anything Heyne-Hassingham tells him.”

Well, we found him in the end. The silly blighter had partly recovered from the drug, walked a hundred yards or so, and tumbled down to sleep again by the stream. He came round when we lifted his slack body and shook it.

“It’s all right,” I encouraged him. “You’re out of trouble now, you know.” .

He replied vaguely that he was very tired. Even with one of us on each side of him, he was too comatose to walk. He kept on grabbing at his bag and mumbling about his papers.

“How soon can you get your car?” Sandorski asked.

“Not enough time. The road may be watched in half an hour. Have you got any more in the bottle?”

He had another ampoule. Lex couldn’t help seeing him bring out the syringe. He stuttered “No! No!” in a cracked, terrified voice, but his will was completely paralyzed. He even held out his arm.

Then began a melancholy procession across the road and up into the hills on the opposite side. I led the way, holding his ankles, and Sandorski followed with his shoulders. We tied his case onto his stomach. It was the only way to carry it.

I had determined to go to my house. I might have found a better refuge–at any rate, for long enough to examine Lex and look at his papers–but it was essential I should go home. I had at once to confess the whole truth to Cecily, or leave the most horrid doubts and worries in her mind as soon as she heard–and, with the morning milk, she would–of the burned car and its unrecognizable driver. I needed the general to back up my story. My future was at stake in a very different way to that which I had feared for the last three weeks.

It was close on dawn when we entered my back gate. I put Sandorski and Lex in the shed at the bottom of the garden, with some brandy and a kerosene stove. Lex had a luxurious overcoat; I hoped that he also had a tough constitution. It had been a cold night for sleeping in the open.

Then I went upstairs and woke Cecily. I pulled the curtains and turned on her bedside light and told her I needed her help and patience.

She started up, with that glow upon her of a woman who loves and is loved. It can’t be analyzed. I remember parading an opinion in bachelor days that the test of a girl’s beauty was what she looked like when she woke up. A truth, but a shallow truth. The real test is what you think she looks like.

I said that I had a long story to tell her, and that I wanted hot food and blankets for two men in the shed.

“But why the shed?” she asked.

“Until the children go to school. They might talk.”

“Nothing wakes the children,” she smiled. “They will be fast asleep for another hour. Why not the spare bedroom?

“Well, it’s just possible that the house might be searched. I don’t for a moment think it will be.”

“Seriously searched?”

“No. But just a look-round on some excuse.”

“Put them in the roof space under the gable. It’s warm up there. And if they don’t move about, but stay over our room–”

“I’m not going to keep them more than a day,” I said.

“You may have to, darling,” she replied, as if she were perfectly accustomed to such a problem.

I never dreamed she could meet the crisis so calmly. She had all the imaginative fears of a mother of young children. Nightmare after nightmare must have been already gathering under the loyalty which was natural to her and the discipline she imposed on herself.

We had to hurry. My back garden was hidden from the road, but in daylight it was in full view of the low line of the hills.

Sandorski laid Lex down inside the door as unaffectedly as if he had been carrying a parcel.

“Madame,” he said. “I am proud to have met the husband of such a wife.

He kissed her hand, and she managed the receiving end like a Grand Duchess. She’d had it kissed innumerable times before, but never in that superb manner.

I put a ladder against the trap door in the roof, and we hauled Lex up by a rope under his armpits. A mattress, blankets and a hot-water bottle followed. How the children slept through it I can’t imagine, but they did.

Meanwhile Cecily was getting tea and eggs ready in the kitchen–not an easy task in the semidarkness. The lighting of her bedside lamp would pass, but when I had put it out I lit no others. Any evidence of early activity in the house had to be avoided.

In the gray and uncomfortable light of the dining room I began my story very irresolutely, and made a thorough mess of it. I didn’t know how far Sandorski would like me to talk of his business, and of course I felt ashamed of that light-hearted shot at Riemann’s expansive target.

“Colonel, my lad, tell her everything,” Sandorski insisted. “Infantry–that’s what you are all through! Won’t take a gamble. Where would you be now if I hadn’t driven your partridges for you, ha?”

“Fast asleep in bed,” I said.

“Yes–with a damn bad conscience. And this lovely golden madonna of yours wondering what the devil had given you indigestion for the last fortnight. You should be grateful to me.”

“I am,” said Cecily.

“If you can still tell me that this evening, Mrs. Taine, I will believe in marriage.”

“But you do.”

She gave him a long look, the meaning of which I did not appreciate until she suddenly laid her hand on his.

“My children were the age of yours,” he said. “They too slept well.”

He put his head in his hands. It had been a hard night.

“Go on,” Cecily ordered me quietly.

She was right. My story gave him time to recover. The gray day grew reluctantly. It was a winter dawn, not autumn.

When I had finished, Cecily looked very drawn and stern. She felt strongly that running about the downs with Polish generals in the middle of the night was not one of the duties of the father of a family. I had implied as much ten times over, and pointed out that there was no phase of the action at which I could possibly have extricated myself. I don’t think she agreed. There had, perhaps, been a little too must gusto in my account of the night’s doings, and not enough repentance.

However, she turned on Sandorski.

“If you are going to stay here, General” she said, “you must promise me one thing.”

“Anything,” he answered gallantly.

“You must promise me that no harm shall come to the man you brought with you.”

“My word of honor that no harm shall come to him under your roof,” he replied.

“I didn’t say anything about my roof. He’s had enough, and you are not to do him any harm at all, now or afterwards.”

“The devil! I don’t even know what he’s been up to.”

“Nor do I. Or care.”

“But, Mrs. Taine, you wouldn’t prevent me from sitting on his head if the police were below?”

“I didn’t mean that at all, and you know it,” she answered violently.

Sandorski thought for a few seconds. He took his word of honor so seriously that he had to draw up a sort of mental contract.

“I promise,” he said, “that he shall not be killed or tortured or handed over to anyone but the British police by me or by my order. Will that do?”

“Yes,” she said, and added illogically: “But I never even thought of such beastly things.”

After breakfast Cecily went to the roof with the general and took Lex’s* pulse and temperature. He wasn’t cold or shivering, and there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him. Sandorski said he ought to sleep for a few hours more. His first injection had been a stab in the dark. The second was carefully placed.

When the general had been settled in the loft with his patient, I gave him a rope for his future movements, took down the ladder, washed it and put it away. Then I went to bed, pretending the touch of flu that I had warned my clerk I was going to have, and Cecily woke the children.

Before she gave them breakfast, she ran races with them– to get them warm, she said–through the back gate and across the meadow. That effectively destroyed the heavy tracks of Sandorski and myself. Then she carefully examined the shed at the bottom of the garden and removed all traces of occupation.

I didn’t expect the police till the evening at earliest. I thought it would take them some time to make the connection between Blossom’s land and the burned car. But when I was about to get up and start the examination of Lex’s suitcase with Sandorski our local constable and his inspector called–in the hope of catching me before I left for the office. Cecily received them downstairs. She was just taking the children to school. The inspector had more low cunning than I ever put to his credit. He chatted with the boys, and quickly found out that Daddy hadn’t felt very well the night before and was still in bed. Cecily told me afterwards that the little innocents were so sorry for me and so convincing that she almost believed in my illness herself.

The two policemen came up to my room, apologizing profusely. They didn’t tell me what had happened. They said that another abandoned vehicle had been found on the upper road. I started to complain, with the querulousness of an invalid, that I had locked my garage at the usual hour and that I didn’t see why I should be bothered for parking without lights if somebody pinched my car.