A Rough Shoot (3 page)

This peace which she created in our home helped me through the next forty-eight hours. When Cecily found a report in Thursday’s evening paper of an abandoned motorcycle on the upper road, which had had its number plates removed and seemed to have been in a smash, I was able to grunt and answer, with complete lack of interest, that I suppose it was stolen. I wanted, of course, day and night, to go up to the shoot and see that the rabbits in their pit were undisturbed, but somehow I managed to control myself until the week end.

On Saturday I took a full day off, and went over the ground with a determined unconcern calculated to deceive any watcher. The knowledge that I might be in the field of somebody’s glasses made me concentrate very nervously on my shooting–with the odd result that I couldn’t miss.

I was careful not to go straight to the pit. When at last I did go there, in the normal course of walking the length of the down for a hare, the slope looked so natural that I wondered at my fears. Then I remembered that there were only nine inches of earth between me and discovery, and I thought of the cowardliness of my act and the cruelty of this lonely death. Yet it was certain that powerful friends knew of his death or disappearance, and would do whatever had to be done.

The stones from the wall were on the plowed field where I had left them. I don’t know what the next-door farmer, to whom this field belonged, made of them. Possibly he assumed that Blossom, with whom he was on very neutral terms, had needed some stones for walling and would clean up the mess in due season. Which of them owned this worthless little plot, with its trees and ruins and nettles, I never found out.

I sat down and ate my sandwiches at the top of the shoot, and as I let my eyes wander over the loved, familiar rise and fall of the land, I became aware that there was a question to be put to it. Those two men who nearly caught me– what were they doing in the northeast corner of the shoot? There was no reason why they should look for me at that end of the boundary hedge, and I was sure I hadn’t made enough noise to attract them. Then suppose that they were not looking for me at all–had given it up, and were on their way back to the road? On their way back from what?

I found enough of their tracks to prove that they had come from the west, along a cattle-proof hedge that divided Blossom’s down. Beyond it, the down ran on in a great expanse of close rabbit turf which had never been plowed. Close to the hedge were dense, rounded thickets of bramble that looked like the huts of a kaffir kraal. They repeated so exactly those domes and bastions where the dead man had been at work that I wondered if the same mysterious activity might not have been carried on.

On my way home I felt, with a vague soldier’s instinct, that the clue to the action must be found in the lie of the land. Yet never was there a more innocent patch of geography. Before me, to the south, was a great semicircle of rolling country, ending in the coastal hills. The smooth hogback where I was gave no impression of height and rose so gradually that it was not conspicuous or in any way a landmark; it was merely the highest point, level, spacious and remote, in a green bowl of farms and villages.

A week passed and nothing happened. I could almost accept an unexpected ring at the doorbell with equanimity. At any rate I had no longer to force myself into unnatural calm. The weather was vile. There were two days of gale with torrents of rain, and then a thick fog came up from the Channel. This suited me well. I went on foot to the pit, not even risking a bicycle in case it should be seen and recognized, and created the appearance of a landslip which had dragged a thorn tree lose from its roots. Thereafter the spot was covered by enough earth and tangled vegetation to discourage man or dog.

The following Saturday afternoon I went out again with my gun, and came on old Blossom and one of his men carting hay from a stack in the southern meadows. He called me over when I shouted a good-afternoon, and on the other side of the cart I found his landlord, Robert Heyne-Hassingham. Blossom introduced me as the man who had taken his shooting, and Heyne-Hassingham at once turned on the charm.

He had plenty of it, part hereditary and part acquired as a practicing politician. He was an excellent landlord and a man of considerable influence in the county–indeed, in all the West of England. During the war he had been chosen, it was said, as the underground leader for a very wide area in the event of a successful German invasion.

After the war, however, he became a slightly comic figure to the average citizen, for he began to take politics as seriously as any ardent socialist. He founded the People’s Union which had a lot of publicity till the newspapers grew tired of it. It was a sort of Boy’s Brigade for grownups, full of Ideals, Service and Religion. Any religion would do. It appealed to disgruntled ex-servicemen, and was supposed to have a following among regular officers of the Army and Navy–a threat that we hadn’t known since Cromwell’s day. To the plain Englishman, however, who keeps his Ideals, Service and Religion packed away in the gun room, well-oiled and ready for use but emphatically out of reach of the children, the People’s Union was offensive. It had a somewhat fascist smell of hierarchy. It paid lip service to democracy, of course, but there was no doubt that if Heyne-Hassingham and his choirboys ever came to power –which no one thought remotely possible but themselves –Parliament would be even more of a rubber stamp than it is.

As I say, he turned on the charm, and naturally enough I was flattered and began to think–as one usually does on meeting an eminent public man in the flesh–that I had greatly misjudged him. He discussed gun and game, talked of old days when his father and the gamekeepers had brought up thousands of pheasants by hand, and asked me if I thought the pheasant was establishing itself successfully as a purely wild bird. I had no doubt that it was.

He knew his countryside, though I had the impression that he was entertaining me with what he had heard rather than what he had observed. That thin, rather ascetic face didn’t really belong to our wealth of slow life.

“Your grandfather was a great friend of our family, Colonel Taine,” he said.

“Mr. Taine,” I corrected him.

Inverted snobbery, I suppose. But it’s ridiculous for an ordinary businessman to go walking about as a colonel.

“I was only thinking,” he smiled, “how proud the old boy would have been of a grandson who commanded his battalion and collected all your gongs on the way.”

I didn’t believe that my grandfather had any connection with the Heyne-Hassinghams–except that he sold them a famous ram of his own breeding–but I accepted this lush suggestion of friendship. Grandfather, if he visited their house at all, would certainly have made some memorable inroads on the Heyne-Hassingham cellar before parting with his ram.

“The country needs men like you,” he said.

That was an invitation, but I wasn’t having any.

“We are a bit short of plain, contented chaps,” I answered.

“That is you?”

“It is.”

“You’re rare then, and you’re very lucky,” he said. “But, believe me, in too many other cases content grows into self-satisfaction.”

He asked us both to stroll as far as his car with him, playing the busy man who did not want to part from agreeable company but had to account for every minute of his time. His conversation was now mostly with Blossom, and about the high down. In answer to his questions Blossom, I remember, told him that the growth of grass had been disappointing that dry summer, and that he wasn’t putting any cattle or sheep on the down till the spring.

The car had been left on the upper road, so we passed that fatal angle of the boundary hedge. It was exactly as I and the dead man had left it, except that rain had cleared away the blood, if there ever was any, and restored the grass.

“By the way, Mr. Blossom,” Heyne-Hassingham asked, “have you agreed with your neighbor to leave that gap open, or is there a right of way?”

“Always bin open, and we keep ‘un open,” Blossom replied noncommittally.

Heyne-Hassingham asked if strangers ever wandered through that way, and was told they didn’t. Then his attention seemed to be drawn by the swarms of rabbits, and he wanted to know if Blossom sold the trapping. Blossom did. All game above ground was mine, but a professional trapper paid a useful sum for the right to take game below ground. He usually spent four or five nights after Christmas clearing out the big warrens.

Heyne-Hassingham kept on with his cross-examination. He stayed in character as an interested landlord, but was persistent as any lawyer.

“Is there any illicit trapping by local bad lads?” he asked.

“Not if Mr. Taine don’t. ‘E should learn, ‘e should! Bit o’ wire and f is old breeches, that’s all ‘e needs. Comes cheaper than bangin’ off fourpence!”

Blossom chuckled and puffed under his scarves and waistcoats, and gave me an enormous wink to assure me he wasn’t to be taken seriously.

“Up here often at night?” Heyne-Hassingham inquired, as if carrying on the joke.

“I? Never.”

This conversation made me uneasy. It might be innocent, but it was near enough to the bone to put me on my guard. And that was as well, for, when we came to the car, there was the handsome, nervous face which I had last seen staring, for a split second, at the dead companion in the bramble bush.

The man was leaning against Heyne-Hassingham’s car with a rather too conscious grace. He was in his early forties, lean, hard and able. I think that even then I spotted him as the type of staff officer whom one most dislikes but from whom one cannot withhold respect. Heyne-Hassingham introduced him as Colonel Hiart.

“This is Mr. Taine,” he said, “who rents the shooting up here.”

There was a hardly perceptible note of mischief in his voice as he gave me my civilian title. He guessed just what I was going to think of Hiart, and let me know–if I were clever enough to see it–that the contrast between us amused him. He was a subtle and likable creature. Natural enough, I suppose. If he hadn’t been, he could never have founded and held the devotion of his People’s Union.

Hiart shook hands. His narrow, dark eyes were laid on me as directly and expressionlessly as the guns of a tank.

“Do you shoot?” I asked him.

“I fear,” he said, “that I find it noisy and unnecessary.”

“I’d find it unnecessary too,” I retorted, “if I still had army rations. But I must admit I enjoy it. I’ll also admit that I think I ought not to.”

That was a perfectly sincere remark; I wasn’t acting. Afterwards, when I knew a little more of Hiart, I saw that I couldn’t have answered better. He had intended deliberately to provoke some reaction, probably brutal, which would give him a line on my character. I wouldn’t like to say what he made of the reaction that in fact he got, but he must have thought it unlikely that I was a man to shoot strangers and remove their bodies.

When the car had driven away and Blossom had returned to his hay carting, I started to tramp through the roots for partridge. It was merely to put up a show of activity. The coveys were far too wild at the end of October to be walked up.

I was perplexed, and in the blackest depression. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt that Heyne-Hassingham and his tame colonel had come over to Blossom’s farm on a Saturday afternoon in the hope of finding me, that they considered me a possible suspect, or, alternatively, a possible ally. All the tripe Heyne-Hassingham had talked about my grandfather’s friendship for his family seemed to indicate that he wanted my own.

Ally in what? That I couldn’t answer. I was shocked and alarmed to discover that Heyne-Hassingham, prominent, patriotic and above suspicion, was connected with the runaway Hiart, with the violence of that nocturnal attempt on me, with a motorcycle so compromising that it had to be left abandoned and unclaimed.

I pulled myself together by remembering that only a week before I had expected every hour to be hauled in by the police for questioning. Well, that hadn’t happened and seemed unlikely to happen, but I began to think I would prefer the police to this fog of uncertainty. I didn’t know whom to protect myself against. I even wondered whether I had interfered by my mysterious, unaccountable shot with some private action of the Intelligence Services. That, if it were so, made my guilt a thousand times worse.

When I got home, there was further evidence that somebody was interested in my movements.

“Have you got a cigarette case that doesn’t belong to you?” Cecily asked.

“No. Why?”

She said that a man had called up and wanted to know if I had found his case. She replied that I hadn’t told her anything, and asked him where he had lost it. When he dined with me the week before last, he said, and added:

“Let’s see. When was that?”

Now, this is a cautionary story for children on the virtue of never having secrets from one’s wife. Cecily knew perfectly well that if I dined with anyone at all, I should have come home full of it.

“Wednesday, of course,” he said.

That disastrous Wednesday, October 19th, when I had ostensibly been in Salisbury, was the only day I could have dined out. Any other wife, piqued at the fact that my doings had been exceptional and puzzling, would have eagerly swallowed the bait; but Cecily smelled something wrong with it.

“No,” she had answered instinctively. “The only night he was out was Saturday.”

She saw the relief in my face. It may be that she even heard a gasp of tension freed. By sheer good sense she had ruled me out as a possible suspect.

“Darling,” she asked anxiously, “you haven’t… ?”

“Yes? What?”

“Well, done anything against the law. But it’s impossible.”

I avoided the direct answer.

“He was trying to find out if I came home late that night,” I said.

I told her, on the spur of the moment and very unconvincingly, that I was investigating a racket in building materials for my firm, and trying to get evidence that the police could not. She accepted it, but she knew very well that I would have told her that much long before, even if I didn’t give the details. And she knew that I knew. There was nothing whatever hidden from either of us, except a bit of prosaic fact.