Rogue Male (21 page)

‘You’re unreasonable, really unreasonable. I’m surprised at a man of your sense enduring such conditions!’

I noticed a touch of impatience in his voice. He had begun to realize that watching badgers in a damp lane on November evenings was not an amusement that anyone would want to carry on for long. He must have wished that he had never thought of that invaluable confession.

‘I can endure them,’ I answered. ‘You’re the man who is suffering for nothing. I’ve come to the conclusion that if I sign that document of yours, you’ll never have occasion to publish it. There isn’t going to be any war. So it doesn’t matter whether I sign or not.’

I thought that would appeal to him as a piece of British casuistry: to deny that I was uncomfortable, but to produce a hypocritical justification for getting more comfort. It was a text-book illustration good enough to take in the foreigner.

As a matter of fact no Englishman that I know would have signed his bloody paper—refusing partly from honour but chiefly from sheer obstinacy. He’s a neurotic creature, the modern John Bull, when compared to the beef-and-ale yeoman of a hundred years ago; but he has lost none of great-grandfather’s pig-headedness.

‘You’re perfectly right, my dear fellow,’ said Quive-Smith. ‘Your signature is a mere necessary formality. The thing will probably stay at the bottom of the archives till the end of time.’

‘Yes, but look here!’ I answered. ‘I trust you not to talk. I don’t know who you are, but you must be pretty high up in your service and have a sense of responsibility. But what about this other fellow? I may lay myself open to blackmail, or he may change sides.’

‘He doesn’t know who you are,’ replied Quive-Smith.

‘How can I be sure of that?’

‘Oh, use your head, man!’ he answered contemptuously—I was pleased that his voice no longer had its usual note of ironical but genuine respect. ‘Is it likely? He doesn’t even know who I am, let alone you. This morning he did his best to find out. I expect you tried to bribe him.’

‘Is he English?’ I asked.

‘No, Swiss. A people, my dear fellow, of quite extraordinary stupidity and immorality. A very rare combination which only a long experience of democratic government could have produced. A Swiss agent is the perfect type of Shakespeare’s Second Murderer.’

I refrained from the obvious gibe. Nobody could cast Quive-Smith as a First Murderer. He was definitely in the employing class.

I wanted to keep him talking, so that he wouldn’t insist on my signing his document immediately. I asked him what was the matter with democracy.

He read me a long lecture, which degenerated into a philippic against the British Empire. I slipped in a provocative word here and there to encourage him. He hated us like hell, considered us (he said it himself) as the Goths must have considered the Roman Empire, a corrupt bunch of moralizing luxury-lovers who could only hold their frontiers by exploiting—and that inefficiently—the enormous wealth and the suffering millions behind them. In fact it was a speech that would have gone equally well in the mouth of his boss’s opposite number on the other side of Poland.

He even had the effrontery to invite me to join the winning side. He said that they needed in all countries natural leaders like myself; I had only to sign, and bygones would be bygones, and I should be given every chance to satisfy my will to power. I didn’t tell him that natural leaders don’t have any will to power. He wouldn’t have understood what I meant.

I dare say he was sincere. I should have been a very useful tool, completely in their power. When you find an agitator who hasn’t suffered poverty, it’s sound to ask whether he has ever been in my position and what he has done that our police don’t know and a foreign police do.

‘I’ll sign in the morning,’ I said.

‘Why not now?’ he answered. ‘Why suffer another night?’ I asked him where on earth I could go. I told him that before I could be let loose on the public, he would have to bring me clothes, and, when I was decently dressed, take me to his farm to wash. All that couldn’t be done at a moment’s notice without arousing a lot of curiosity.

‘I see your point,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ll bring you clothes in the morning.’

‘And get that Swiss of yours away before we talk! That’s what worries me most. I don’t trust him a yard.’

‘My dear fellow,’ he protested, ‘I wish you would give me credit for some discretion.’

When the Second Murderer had come on duty and settled down for the night, I started to practise with the ballista, stuffing a coat into my end of the ventilator so that the thud of the pegs could not be heard. The strips of hide had shrunk into even tighter coils. It was a more powerful weapon than I needed, and the devil to pull; I had to use both hands, my left on the shaft of the spit, my right gripping the ring, held horizontally so that it did not catch as it flew through the aperture. At a range of four feet the spit drilled clean through two tins of tomatoes and buried itself six inches in the earth. I shot it off less than a dozen times, for the construction was none too strong.

I unstopped the ventilator and fanned for an hour to change the air. Heaven knows whether it really made any difference, but it was worth trying since my next task was to persuade the Swiss to shut up his end of the ventilator, and keep it shut while I straightened the tunnel.

I began moaning and mumbling to shake his nerves a bit. When he ordered me to stop it, I said I would if he told me the time.

‘Half-past two,’ he answered sulkily.

I stayed quiet for another hour, and then went off my head again—sobs and maniac laughter and appeals to him to let me out. He endured my noises with annoying patience (hoping perhaps for that hypothetical reward) and compelled me to such a show of hysteria before he plugged the hole that I managed to get on my own nerves into the bargain. My acting was good enough to be a genuine release for my feelings.

The straightening of the tunnel was easy and quite silent. I dug with my knife and gathered the earth handful by handful. At intervals I let off some moans to discourage him from removing the plug. The curve vanished, and in its place was an empty hollow, like a rabbit’s nest, with two mouths. His plug was a piece of sacking. I opened out its folds on my side without disturbing its position. I could breathe without difficulty and hear every sound in the lane.

I arranged my rolled sleeping-bag under my shoulder-blades, and lay on my back in the mud with the engine presented and the spit fitted to the throng. I had to be ready to fire the moment that a man’s head appeared at the hole. The removal of the sacking would give me time to draw, and if anyone looked into the hole and noticed that its shape had been altered, that would be the last thing he ever noticed.

I hoped that the Swiss would leave the sacking alone. I felt no compunction in killing him, but if he removed the plug immediately before Quive-Smith’s arrival I might not be able to cut my way out in time to surprise the major. I kept up enough muttering to prove that I was a nuisance and alive, but not so much that he would be tempted to pull out the sacking and curse me.

The light of morning gleamed through the folds. I waited. I waited, it seemed to me, till long after midday before Quive-Smith arrived. As a matter of fact, he was early—if, that is, he usually came at ten a.m.

For the first time I could hear all their conversation. At that hour in the morning they spoke in low voices and as little as possible.

‘He has gone mad, sir,’ reported the Swiss stolidly.

‘Oh, I don’t expect so,’ answered Quive-Smith. ‘He’s just avoiding the crisis. He’ll soon be calm.’

‘Usual time tonight, sir?’

‘If not, I will let you know. Your woman has been warned that you may be leaving?’

‘Yes, sir.’

I heard his heavy steps sploshing off through the mud. All this time I was lying on my back and staring at the hole.

I cannot remember the slightest effort in drawing the ballista. There was a flash of light as he withdrew the plug. I started, and that slight jerk of my muscles seemed to pull the thong. Immediately afterwards his head appeared. I noticed the surprise in his eyes, but by that time I think he was dead. The spit took him square above the nose. He looked, when he vanished, as if someone had screwed a ring into his forehead.

I hacked at my end of the ventilator until it was large enough to receive my body, then crawled inside and burst through into the lane with a drive of head and shoulders. Quive-Smith was lying on his back watching me. I had my thumbs on his wind-pipe before I realized what had happened. The foot of spit that projected behind his skull was holding up his head in a most life-like manner. He hadn’t brought any spare clothes. Perhaps he didn’t intend me to live after he had my signature; perhaps he didn’t believe that I would sign. The latter is the more charitable thought. He had a loaded revolver in his pocket, but that is no proof one way or the other.

I burned that scandalous document, then stretched myself and peered through the hedge over the once familiar fields. Pat was nowhere in sight, and his cows were grazing peacefully. Patachon was talking to his shepherd on the down. It was a damp November day, windless, sunless, of so soft a neutrality that, coming to it straight from disinterment, I couldn’t tell whether the temperature was ten or thirty degrees above freezing-point. By Quive-Smith’s watch it was only eleven. I ate his lunch. Behold, Sisera lay dead and the nail was in his temples.

I destroyed his screen of bushes and his camera (thorough though I knew him to be, I was surprised that he had really set the scene for his badger watching) and folded up the heavy motor-rug which kept him warm. Then I shifted the log that was jammed between both banks of the lane, and opened the door of the burrow. The stench was appalling. I had been out only half an hour, but that was enough for me to notice, as if it had been created by another person, the atmosphere in which I had been living.

Boiling some muddy water on the Primus, I sponged my body—a gesture rather than a wash. It was heaven to feel dry and warm when I had changed into his clothes. He had heavy whipcord riding-breeches, a short fur-lined shooting coat—Central European rather than English, but the ideal garment for his job—over his tweeds and a fleece-lined trench-coat over the lot.

When I was dressed I went through his papers. He had the party and identity documents of his own nation, with his real name on them. He also had a British passport. It was not in the name of Quive-Smith. He had put on that name and character for this particular job. His occupation was given as Company Director, almost as non-committal as Author. Anybody can qualify for either description, as every police-court magistrate knows; but they look impressive.

In a belt round his waist I found £200 in gold and a second passport. It had twice been extended by obscure consulates, but had neither stamps nor visas on it, showing that it had never yet been used for travel. That this passport was his own private affair was a fair assumption. The photograph showed his face and hair darkened with stain, and without a moustache. If I were in Quive-Smith’s game, I should take care to have a similar passport; should he have a difference of opinion with his employers, he could disappear completely and find a home in a very pleasant little Latin country.

I held up any definite plans until after I should have interviewed the Swiss, but when I cut my hair and shaved I left myself a moustache exactly like the major’s and brushed my hair, as his, straight back from the forehead. The name and identity of the Company Director might suit me very well.

I removed what was left of Asmodeus and buried him in the lane where he had lived and hunted, with a tin of beef to carry him through till he learned the movements of game over his new ground. I plugged the ragged hole made by my escape with my old clothes, my bedding and earth, and took from the den my money and the exercise book that contained the two first parts of this journal. Then I replaced the original door, and laid the iron plate against the bank of the lane, covering it with earth and debris. When the nettles and bracken grow up in the spring—and thick they will grow on that turned earth—there will be no trace of any of us.

I propped up Quive-Smith’s body against a bush, where it was out of the way. Not a pretty act, but his siege had destroyed my sensibility. I had room for no feeling but immense relief. After dusk I walked round Pat’s pasture to accustom my legs to exercise. I was very weak, and probably a bit light-headed. It didn’t matter. Since all that remained was to take crazy risks, to be a little crazy was no disadvantage.

The tracks in the mud told me that the Swiss always entered and left by the top of the lane. There was no mistaking the prints left by Quive-Smith’s abnormally small feet. I had been compelled to keep my own shoes, and the heels of his stockings were lumps under my soles.

I squatted against the bank in the darkest section of the lane and waited. I heard the fellow a quarter of a mile away. He was moving reasonably quietly where the lanes were dry, but had no patience with mud.

When he was a few paces from me I flashed Quive-Smith’s torch on his face and ordered him to put his hands up. I have never seen such a badly frightened man. From his point of view he had been held up in the middle of nowhere by a maniac with a considerable grudge against him.

I made him keep his face to the hedge while I removed his documents, his pistol, and his trouser-buttons. I had read of that trick, but never seen it done. It’s effective. A man with his trousers round his ankles is not only hindered; his morale is destroyed.

He carried a passport on him. I suppose those chaps always do. A glance at the first page showed me that his name was Muller, that he was naturalized English and that he was a hotel porter. He was a big man, fair-haired, with a fair moustache waxed to points. He looked as if he had modelled himself upon some ex-NCO of the Corps of Commissionaires.

‘Is he dead?’ the man stammered.

I told him to turn round and look, keeping him covered while I flashed the light on Quive-Smith’s naked body. Then I put him back with his face to the hedge. He was shaking with fear and cold. His legs pulsated. He exhibited all the other involuntary reactions of panic. I had thrown his imagination out of control.