Game Without Rules (30 page)

Then, whistling softly to himself, Mr. Calder would walk downstairs to cook breakfast for himself and for Rasselas.

The postman, who arrived at eleven o’clock, brought the newspapers with the letters. Perhaps because he lived alone and saw so few people, Mr. Calder seemed particularly fond of his letters and papers. He opened them with a loving care which an observer might have found ludicrous. His fingers caressed the envelope or the wrapping paper very gently, as a man will squeeze a cigar. Often he would hold an envelope up to the light as if he could read, through the outer covering, the message inside. Sometimes he would even weigh an envelope in the delicate letter scales which he kept on top of his desk between a stuffed seagull and a night-scented jasmine in a pot.

On a fine morning in May, when the sun was fulfilling in majesty the promise of a misty dawn, Mr. Calder unfolded his copy of the
Times,
turned, as was his custom, to the foreign news pages and started to read.

He had stretched his hand out toward his coffee cup when he stopped. It was a tiny check, a break in the natural sequence of his actions, but it was enough to make Rasselas look up. Mr. Calder smiled reassuringly at the dog. His hand resumed its movement, picked up the cup, and carried it to his mouth. But the dog was not easy.

Mr. Calder read once more the five-line item which had caught his attention. Then he glanced at his watch, went across to the telephone, dialed a Lamperdown number and spoke to Jack at the garage, which also ran a taxi service.

“Just do it if we hurry,” said Jack. “No time to spare. I’ll come right up.”

While he waited for the taxi, Mr. Calder first telephoned Mr. Behrens, to warn him that they might have to postpone their game of backgammon. Then he spent a little time telling Rasselas that he was leaving him in charge of the cottage, but that he would be back before dark. Rasselas swept the carpet with his feathery tail, and made no attempt to follow Mr. Calder when Jack’s Austin came charging up the hill and reversed in front of the cottage gate.

In the end, the train was ten minutes late at the junction, and Mr. Calder caught it with ease.

He got out at Victoria, walked down Victoria Street, turned to the right, opposite the open space where the Colonial office used to stand, and to the right again into the Square. In the southwest corner stands the Westminster branch of the London and Home Counties Bank.

Mr. Calder walked into the bank. The head cashier, Mr. Macleod, nodded gravely to him and said, “Mr. Fortescue is ready. You can go straight in.”

“I’m afraid the train was late,” said Mr. Calder. “We lost ten minutes at the junction, and never caught it up.”

“Trains are not as reliable now as they used to be,” agreed Mr. Macleod.

A young lady from a nearby office had just finished banking the previous day’s takings. Mr. Macleod was watching her out of the corner of his eye until the door had shut behind her. Then he said, with exactly the same inflection, but more softly, “Will it be necessary to make any special arrangements for your departure?”

“Oh, no, thank you,” said Mr. Calder. “I took all the necessary precautions.”

“Fine,” said Mr. Macleod.

He held open the heavy door, panelled in sham walnut in the style affected by pre-war bank designers, ushered Mr. Calder into the anteroom and left him there for a few moments, in contemplation of its only ornament, a reproduction in a massive gilt frame of Landseer’s allegory “The Tug of War.”

Then the head cashier reappeared and held open the door for Mr. Calder, and Mr. Fortescue came forward to greet him.

“Nice to see you,” he said. “Grab a chair. Any trouble on the way up?”

“No trouble,” said Mr. Calder. “I don’t think anything can start for another two or three weeks.”

“They might have post-dated the item to put you off your guard.” He picked up his own copy of the
Times
and reread the four and a half lines of print which recorded that Colonel Josef Weinleben, the international expert on bacterial antibodies, had died in Klagenfurt as the result of an abdominal operation.

“No,” said Calder. “He wanted me to read it, and sweat.”

“It would be the established procedure to organise his own ‘death’ before setting out on a serious mission,” Mr. Fortescue agreed. He picked up a heavy paper knife and tapped thoughtfully with it on the desk. “But it could be true, this time. Weinleben must be nearly sixty.”

“He’s coming,” said Mr. Calder. “I can feel it in my bones. It may even be true that he’s ill. If he was dying, he’d like to take me along with him.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I tortured him,” said Mr. Calder. “And broke him. He’d never forget.”

“No,” said Mr. Fortescue. He held the point of the paper knife toward the window, sighting down it as if it had been a pistol. “No. I think very likely you’re right. We’ll try to pick him up at the port, and tag him. But we can’t guarantee to stop him getting in. If he tries to operate, of course, he’ll have to show his hand. You’ve got your permanent cover. Do you want anything extra?”

He might, thought Mr. Calder, have been speaking to a customer. You’ve got your normal overdraft. Do you want any extra accommodation, Mr. Calder? The bank is here to serve you. There was something at the same time ridiculous and comforting in treating life and death as though they were entries in the same balance sheet.

“I’m not at all sure that I want you to stop him,” he said. “We aren’t at war. You could only deport him. It might be more satisfactory to let him through.”

“Do you know,” said Mr. Fortescue, “the same thought had occurred to me.”

Mrs. Farmer, who kept the Seven Gables Guest House, between Aylesford and Bearsted, considered Mr. Wendon a perfect guest. His passport and the card which he had duly filled in on arrival showed him to be a Dutchman; but his English, though accented in odd places, was colloquial and fluent. An upright, red-faced, grey-haired man, he was particularly nice with Mrs. Farmer’s two young children. Moreover, he gave no trouble. He was – and this was a sovereign virtue in Mrs. Farmer’s eyes – methodical and predictable.

Every morning, in the endless succession of the fine days which heralded that summer, he would go out walking, clad in aged but respectable tweed, field glass over one shoulder, a small knapsack on the other for camera, sandwiches and thermos flask. And in the evenings he would sit in the lounge, drinking a single glass of schnapps as an aperitif before dinner, and entertaining Tom and Rebecca with accounts of the birds he had observed that day. It was difficult to imagine, seeing him sitting there, gentle, placid, and upright, that he had killed men and women – and children, too – with his own well-kept hands. But then Mr. Wendon, or Weinleben, or Weber, was a remarkable man.

On the tenth day of his stay, he received a letter from Holland. Its contents seemed to cause him some satisfaction, and he read it twice before putting it away in his wallet. The stamps he tore off, giving them to Mrs. Farmer for Tom.

“I may be a little late this evening,” he said. “I am meeting a friend at Maidstone. Don’t keep dinner for me.”

That morning he packed his knapsack with particular care and caught the Maidstone bus at Aylesford crossroads. He had said that he was going to Maidstone and he never told unnecessary lies.

After that his movements became somewhat complicated, but by four o’clock he was safely ensconced in a dry ditch to the north of the Old Rectory at Lamperdown. Here he consumed a biscuit, and observed the front drive of the house.

At a quarter past four, Jack arrived with his taxi and Mr. Behren’s aunt came out, wearing, despite the heat of the day, coat and gloves and a rather saucy scarf, and was installed in the back seat. Mr. Behrens handed in her shopping basket, waved good-bye and retired into the house.

Five minutes later, Mr. Wendon was knocking at the front door. Mr. Behrens opened it, and blinked when he saw the gun in his visitor’s hand.

“I must ask you to turn around and walk in front of me,” said Mr. Wendon.

“Why should I?” said Mr. Behrens. He sounded more irritated than alarmed.

“If you don’t, I shall shoot you,” said Mr. Wendon, He said it exactly as if he meant it and pushed Mr. Behrens toward a door.

After a moment, Mr. Behrens wheeled about and asked, “Where now?”

“That looks the sort of place I had in mind,” said Mr. Wendon. “Open the door and walk in. But quite slowly.”

It was a small dark room, devoted to hats, coats, sticks, old tennis rackets, croquet mallets, bee veils and such.

“Excellent,” said Mr. Wendon. He helped himself to the old-fashioned tweed hat and the iron-tipped walking stick which Mr. Behrens carried abroad with him on all his perambulations of the countryside. “A small window and a stout old door. What could be better?”

Still watching Mr. Behrens closely, he laid the hat and stick on the hall table, dipped his left hand into his own coat pocket and brought out a curious-looking metal object.

“You have not, perhaps, seen one of these before? It works on the same principle as a Mills grenade, but is six times as powerful and is incendiary as well as explosive. When I shut this door, I shall bolt it and hang the grenade from the up-turned bolt. The least disturbance will dislodge it. It is powerful enough to blow the door down.”

“All right,” said Mr. Behrens. “But get on with it. My sister will be back soon.”

“Not until eight o’clock, if she adheres to last week’s arrangements,” said Mr. Wendon, quite knowingly.

He closed the door, shot the bolts, top and bottom, and suspended the grenade with artistic care from the top one.

Mr. Calder had finished his tea by five o’clock, and then shortly afterward strolled down to the end of the paddock, where he was repairing the fence. Rasselas lay quietly in the lee of the woodpile. The golden afternoon turned imperceptibly toward evening.

Rasselas wrinkled his velvet muzzle to dislodge a fly. On one side he could hear Mr. Calder digging with his mattock into the hilltop chalk and grunting as he dug. Behind, some four fields away, a horse, fly-plagued, was kicking its heels and bucking. Then, away to his left, he located a familiar sound. The clink of an iron-tipped walking stick on stone.

Rasselas liked to greet the arrival of this particular friend of his master, but he waited with dignity until the familiar tweed had come into view. Then he unfolded himself and trotted gently out into the road.

So strong was the force of custom, so disarming were the familiar and expected sight and sound, that even Rasselas’ five senses were lulled. But his instinct was awake. The figure was still a dozen paces off and advancing confidently, when Rasselas stopped. His eyes searched the figure. Right appearance, right hat, right noises. But wrong gait. Quicker, and more purposeful than their old friend. And, above all, wrong smell.

The dog hackled, then crouched as if to jump. But it was the man who jumped. He leaped straight at the dog; his hand came out from under his coat and the loaded stick hissed through the air with brutal force. Rasselas was still moving, and the blow missed his head but struck him full on the back of the neck. He went down without a sound.

Mr. Calder finished digging the socket for the corner post he was planting, straightened his back and decided that he would fetch the brush and creosote from the house. As he came out of the paddock, he saw the great dog lying in the road.

He ran forward and knelt in the dust. There was no need to look twice.

He hardly troubled to raise his eyes when a voice which he recognised spoke from behind him.

“Keep your hands in sight,” said Colonel Weinleben, “and try not to make any sudden or unexpected move.”

Mr. Calder got up.

“I suggest we move back into the house,” said the colonel. “We shall be more private there. I should like to devote at least as much attention to you as you did to me on the last occasion we met.”

Mr. Calder seemed hardly to be listening. He was looking down at the crumpled, empty, tawny skin, incredibly changed by the triviality of life’s departure. His eyes were full of tears.

“You killed him,” he said.

“As I shall shortly kill you,” said the colonel. And, as he spoke, he spun round like a startled marionette, took a stiff pace forward and fell, face downward.

Mr. Calder looked at him incuriously. From the shattered hole in the side of his head, dark blood ran out and mixed with the white dust. Rasselas had not bled at all. He was glad of that tiny distinction between the two deaths.

It was Mr. Behrens who had killed Colonel Weinleben, with a single shot from a .312 rifle fired from the edge of the wood. The rifle was fitted with a telescopic sight, but the shot was a fine one, even for an excellent marksman such as Mr. Behrens.

He’d run for nearly a quarter of a mile before firing it; he had to get into position very quickly, and he had only just been able to see the colonel’s head over the top of an intervening hedge.

He burst through this hedge now, saw Rasselas and started to curse.

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Mr. Calder. He was sitting in the road, the dog’s head in his lap.

“If I’m meant to look after you, I ought to look after you properly,” said Mr. Behrens. “Not let myself be jumped by an amateur like that. I hadn’t reckoned on him blocking the door with a grenade. I had to break out of the window, and it took me nearly half an hour.”

“We’ve a lot to do,” said Mr. Calder. He got stiffly to his feet and went to fetch a spade.

Between them they dug a deep grave behind the woodpile, and laid the dog in it and filled it in, and patted the earth into a mound. It was a fine resting place, looking out southward over the feathery tops of the trees, across the Weald of Kent. A resting place for a prince.

Colonel Weinleben they buried later, with a good deal more haste and less ceremony, in the wood. He was the illegitimate son of a cobbler from Mainz and greatly inferior to the dog, both in birth and breeding.