Gunner Kelly (15 page)

He could see the churchyard wall ahead, and the stile which he had crossed and recrossed a few hours earlier.

The age of direct action: The Greens and Ban the Bomb, Ban Nuclear Power, Ban War itself… And here they had, if not the Greens, something like them in England—CND and other peace movements … and Greenpeace, and all the animal-lovers, who raided the laboratories and disrupted the hunting of animals.

Hunting humans, now—maybe that wasn’t so wicked!

He climbed the stile, avoiding the gravel path in preference for the noiseless grass between the gravestones.

Colonel Butler:
“They’ve got longer memories in the c
ountry … Not that they needed them for the Old General. He was something rather special, so it seems—something out of the past, just as Duntisbury Chase and Duntisbury Royal are also out of the past, and rather special… I think we have to accept that they
conceive they have a duty—that they loved him and that therefore they have the obligation and the right to avenge him, Captain.”

That was the motive-power behind direct action, and what made it so dangerous: it had the powerful fuels of love and duty and self-righteousness in the engine-room, which gave ordinary decent men and women the resolution to act and to endure.

He could see the tall cross of the War Memorial ahead of him now, between two of the ancient yew-trees which the English habitually planted in their churchyards—

The question was not where the true power came from— here, in this churchyard, approaching
that
cross, which was the symbol of the Saviour of both the English and the Germans in their last hour, commemorating the fallen on both sides— which had been Papa’s cross and Mother’s cross simultaneously … the question was
who was on the bridge here, at the controls, in the driving seat, directing that power to what ends
?

He came to the churchyard’s wicket-gate, close by the memorial and with the loom of the
Eight Bells
on his left. There was a single light in the public house, but in a dormer window in the roof, not at ground level; yet there was no police car in the car park—there were no cars at all… And Colonel Butler had promised that the police would stay in the village, prowling around, until after midnight.

He looked at his watch.

The question was … but the question divided itself as he approached it…

Rebecca Maxwell-Smith and the inhabitants of Duntisbury Royal might have desired vengeance, but they would not have known how to encompass it.

Mr Kelly—
Gunner
Kelly, from long ago—would have desired that same vengeance … and if Colonel Butler’s guess was correct Kelly was the extra ingredient in the Duntisbury Chase conspiracy.

But it was Dr David Audley who gave that conspiracy a dimension of importance to the security of the state—who, if the Colonel was right, would not be interested in vengeance, and who would not connive in murder, least of all a murder by Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith, whose welfare he had promised to safeguard.

But now the more important question was … how long after midnight would the police prowl around Duntisbury Royal? And that relegated all the other questions to temporary obscurity.

Through the wicket-gate—it had been well-oiled at midday, so it would not betray him now—and quickly across the road to the grass verge on the other side: at least he possessed the enormous advantage of having walked through the village this afternoon in Benje’s company, even if he had been steered away from the lodge gates, and the lodge, and the manor house itself.

And another thing was for sure: he could not approach the lodge, where Gunner Kelly lived, directly from the road. If there had been someone on watch at the ford and near the footbridge, there would surely be someone in the tangle of shrubbery on each side keeping an eye on those iron gates. But that presented no special problem, because where the grounds of the manor fronted the village there was a thick belt of trees held back by a stone wall; and the wall, neither too high nor (so far as he had observed) topped with spikes or broken glass, he could scale at any point (spikes and lacerating points of glass would not be the Maxwell family style: the esteem in which they were held suggested to Benedikt that they would fight their intruders fairly, without such unpleasantness).

Where to cross the wall, though … that had to be an arbitrary decision: not too close to the lodge entrance, but it was a long wall, undulating with the rise and fall of the land itself, so not too far away either.

When he was half-way to the gates, approaching headlights drove him down into the shelter of the convenient gateway of a darkened cottage: he shrank close to a thick hedge until the vehicle cruised past slowly, its lights searching out the road ahead of it; but, with relief, he saw that it was Mr Russell’s police car, unmistakable with its broad red-stripe-against-white as it rolled by, even though its illuminated
Police
sign was not switched on. And with Mr Russell still in Duntisbury Royal now he could reasonably depend on a few undisturbed minutes. Darkness and silence settled back in its wake, and this piece of wall was as good as any other.

Over the wall, under the trees, it was darker still, and he would dearly have liked the help of the torch with which the SAS cylinder had supplied him. But although it was impossible now to move in total silence, the thick carpet of leaves, soft and springy under his feet, blanked out all but the occasional sound.

Also, the trees were not so thick that he couldn’t make out the obstacles ahead of him: separate tangles of branches and thickets of vegetation in clearings routed him through the woods along an obvious path, with no real alternative. And he knew, estimating distance half by experience from the afternoon and half by his sixth directional sense, that he was making progress to where he wanted to go, safely inside the manor grounds at the rear of the house itself.

Then his next step sank deeper into the leaves—

And deeper—

And deeper—
and suddenly too deep
—

Too late, he tried to throw his weight back, as his foot sank down past ankle, past knee—suddenly he had no foot, no ankle, no knee, no leg,
and he was trying to fall back, but he was falling forwards int
o ground which was opening up underneath him
—

THE PIT
, on a quick estimate, was something more than three metres deep—nearer four even—and at least two metres square at the bottom. And its walls were sheer.

Not to panic
, Benedikt admonished himself.

He switched off his torch and extended his arms on each side of him, adjusting his position until he lost contact with the side closest to where he had landed. Even with the torch as an extension to one hand he couldn’t touch both walls simultaneously, and the same applied when he swivelled through ninety degrees.

More than two metres wide each way, then. And probably three metres deep. And sheer-walled.

He stood absolutely still, counting off his heart-beats until he was sure he could hear no sound but the thump in his own chest. He had seemed to descend with a great crashing noise, yet most of that must have been in his own ears, and if there was no sentry near the pit his fall might yet be unnoticed.

Not to panic, then!

He shifted his feet. At least he had fallen soft, into what felt underfoot like a mixture of wet broken earth and leaves; and now he was standing almost knee deep in the wreckage of the false floor of the wood above him, through which he had plunged.

Damn it to hell
! It was anger, not panic, which momentarily clogged his throat and his thinking:
To be caught like this, in the oldest, simplest trap of all—like an animal!

With an effort of will he swallowed his anger and cleared his head. Wasting time on that foolish emotion only compounded his difficulties. And, given time, there was no trap from which a thinking animal could not escape—

He risked the torch again. Down here, at least, it would not betray him far and wide, as it would have done up above, so long as he kept the beam down—

The walls were pale and chalky: this was ideal ground for digging without revetment, like that into which Grandpapa must have dug in France all those years ago, for his Siegfried Stellung—

Above him, almost within reach—perhaps within reach, the remains of the lattice of woven branches which had supported the deceptive roof of the trap gaped downwards: it had been so well-fabricated that he had not dislodged the whole construction in his fall—

If he could reach up and pull the whole of it down … would that raise him high enough … or provide him with anything he could use—?

He studied the lattice, shading the beam of his torch with his hand. A single leaf, detaching itself from the thick layer which had concealed the trap, floated down on to him, brushing past his cheek. With a spasm of despair he saw that it was too far above him, undeniably built by someone who knew his business—someone who had calculated a structure just strong enough to bear that treacherous carpet of leaves, which had at first yielded under him like the rest of the forest floor, and then had welcomed him into the pit when it was too late.

He fought back the despair as it edged him again towards that other trap of panic from which he had already forced himself back.

This was not on the Other Side
: he was not Benedikt Schneider, whose print-out and voice-print and finger-prints and photograph were all on the A10 KGB Red Code—

This was Thomas Wiesehöfer, and this was England—and if that was also Dr David Audley’s England it was Colonel Butler’s Engl
and too—

So … what could they do to him, anyway—Dr David Audley—and Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith, and Gunner Kelly, and Benje’s Dad smoking on the river-bank—? What could they do to him?

So … perhaps what he ought to do, as Thomas Wiesehöfer—as innocent Thomas Wiesehöfer—was to shout ‘
Help’
at the top of his voice, and
be
Thomas Wiesehöfer thereafter—

What he did do was to uncover the full beam of his torch, as Thomas Wiesehöfer might have done, to examine the unexpected man-trap into which he had fallen.

Another leaf, and then a whole handful of leaves, descended from above with a dry scraping sound, as though dislodged by the light itself. And there, high up and half-hidden amongst the sagging lattice-work on the edge of the pit in the nearest corner to where he had fallen, was the end of a rope-ladder!

Benedikt cursed himself for not noticing it immediately, as an innocent Thomas Wiesehöfer would surely have done once he had collected his wits after plunging into the pit. In the direct beam of the torch there was no doubt about it: it was a genuine and undoubted rope-ladder, its rungs stretched and mud-stained with previous use by the diggers of the pit!

It was hardly believable, even for amateurs … but someone had been careless again, failing to draw up the rope-ladder which the diggers had used—failing to draw it up that last half-metre, to the lip of the pit—?

Unless—he frowned to himself as an alternative possibility, even more unbelievable, intruded into his mind—unless this wasn’t a man-trap at all—?

An
animal-trap
? If it was a man-trap then that rope-ladder had no place in it. But an
animal-trap
—

Yet what sort of animal was there in Duntisbury Chase that they might want to trap—if everything which he and Colonel Butler had imagined was no more than an illusion of a fevered sense of insecurity? There were no wild boar in England, there were only foxes and deer … But was this how the English trapped those creatures out of season?

He shook his head. Man or animal, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting out of the pit while there was still time to do so: Thomas and Benedikt were both agreed on that!

He turned the torch to the debris in which he stood, foraging among the branches of the fallen part of the lattice. With the right extension to his arm the rope-ladder was well within reach, and after that everything depended on whether it was firmly anchored above, sufficiently to bear his weight, or merely piled for removal with that careless end enticing him to disappointment.

He hooked the end of the branch over the rung and pulled gently. The rope bowed, and then tautened as he increased the pressure. A quantity of leaves and assorted duff from the forest floor above descended on him, together with small hard fragments of chalk from the lip of the pit. For a moment the rope-ladder resisted him while it sorted itself out, then it came free with a sudden rush-and-slither, bringing down a miniature deluge of the same mixture with it, including a larger lump of chalk which struck him sharply and painfully on the cheekbone. The noise of it all, confined within the almost-enclosed space of the pit, seemed as deafening as his orginal fall, so that when the silence came back once more and lengthened again into safety he marvelled at his continued good fortune.

Then reason asserted itself. Man-trap or animal-trap, there must be others like it in other likely places: traps sited like this one, which used the natural forest obstacles to funnel the quarry along convenient routes into them. But the village’s manpower available over every twenty-four hours of light and darkness must be strictly limited, and most of it would have to be used to cover the open country which could not be man-trapped, so that the traps would only be checked at intervals. Not for Duntisbury Royal the vicious anti-personnel mines, and voracious dogs, and merciless heat-seeking sensors of the Other Side’s frontier, thank God!

And, once again, he had been lucky nevertheless, to fall into this trap between checks, with time to spare (or perhaps the police raid had dislocated the schedule?)—and luckiest of all to fall into this particular trap, of all others, in which their carelessness had again cancelled out their ingenuity.

But now there was no more time to lose if he was to capitalise on that good fortune: he had to cut his losses and run with what he had—