Watcher in the Shadows (20 page)

If he had had a saber he could have cut me down three times over. A .45 Colt from a frantic, rearing horse was a less reliable weapon. Where the shots went I do not know, but they didn’t hit. One nicked the point of the mare’s shoulder, for I remember vividly the smell of burned hair and I think I saw a streak of blood. That was the end. The mare shied and fought him, and I was into the trees before he could regain control.

I dropped onto the carpet of beech leaves gasping for breath. To be at the receiving end of a cavalry charge is not a sport for a man in his forties. It took me some time to realize that I was unhurt, and longer still before my hand was steady enough to shoot. I told myself that honors were even. St. Sabas had found out with little risk to himself that I was not dead. On the other hand I was safely in cover and could at last fight my battle under conditions which I understood. An optimistic view, but good for morale. If ever a man had been defeated, I had.

Now for the first time I realized that there was going to be no quick end to this duel. When I put forward my desperate proposal which allowed us at last to rise from that garden table, I had imagined an affair of dishonor in the last of the daylight which ten minutes would settle. I did not foresee the low, gray cloud sweeping across the Cotswolds and bringing night half an hour too soon. My life was going to depend on chancy snapshooting in darkness, and the question of ammunition supply was vital.

Had St. Sabas got an extra magazine? Very improbable. He must have ridden out that afternoon assuming — if one could guess what murderers assumed — that one or, at the most, two shots would do. How many had he fired from his mare? Was it three or four? I was ashamed of not knowing, but it had seemed like a dozen. Only by counting the reports in my memory — as a man can count afterwards the number of times a single cylinder has fired though at the moment the roar was nearly continuous — could I work out the truth. It was four, plus his first shot from the edge of the trees. That left St. Sabas three in his magazine against eight in the Mauser. Better say four in the magazine in case he started with one up the spout. And he would. By this time I knew him.

Both of us were now on foot and under the beeches. The windbreak was a rough oval with a diameter of a hundred and fifty yards one way and about a hundred the other. That sounds a small arena for terror and uncertainty, but visibility was down to twenty feet if the enemy moved and nothing at all if he didn’t. Wherever a man lay down he automatically created an ambush. So, on the face of it, the odds were heavily against the attacker. But it was not much use to crouch and wait and switch a tail unless the prey could be attracted out of a thousand possible squares of darkness into the right one. And that meant that the defender had to make some noise while the attacker could afford to move silently.

The only moonlit space was the clearing in the center of the copse which led to the barn. It gave an impression of being longer than it really was and looked like an avenue. At the head of it the entrance to the barn showed as a black arch, flanked on the left by a broken outline of black where were the remains of an old dung heap and a pile of rubbish.

St. Sabas was on the other side of this avenue. If he wanted to attack he had either to cross the open, which was suicide, or to work his way round the back of the barn into my side of the wood. I could faintly hear him on the move, so I decided to let him take the initiative.

I tiptoed silently to the back — the north side — of the barn, where the belt of trees was narrow, and waited for him to enter my territory. But he was up to that one. He left the trees and took to the open hillside, reentering the wood behind me and in my half of it. He did not seem to be taking the precaution of moving silently, so I knew that he meant me to hear what he was doing. I could not make it out at all.

Had he decoyed me round to the back of the barn so that he could enter it by the door? I returned to the front and covered the door, though I had an uneasy instinct that the move was what he intended me to make and I paid more attention to my own security than the threshold of the barn.

But he was nowhere near the barn. To my astonishment I saw him cross the bottom of the clearing. He then started another round of the copse, sometimes out on the hillside, sometimes penetrating deeply into the trees. It was little use trying to intercept him or hunt him down. His movements were quite unpredictable.

This was nerve-racking. It only made sense on the theory that he was testing me to see if I were fool enough to fire at random. He used his mare, too — twice slapping her away to trot on her own through the darkness. I began to wonder if he had gone mad under the strain. This circling and darting back reminded me of an inefficient beater ordered to drive the game into the center of the cover and thoroughly apprehensive about what might break back.

It was I, however, who was apprehensive and beginning to be fascinated. Tiger? He was more like a stoat or a weasel playing the fool in order to attract a bird’s curiosity. Well, if he wanted me to come fluttering up to him, I was not going to.

His occasional dashes on the other side of the clearing took him nearer and nearer to the barn. So that was it, I thought; he meant to distract my attention so that he could get inside and make me winkle him out. The next time I heard him safely turning somersaults on the north side I crossed the front and dropped into the shadows of the old manure heap. As soon as another dash for the barn began, I crawled in and turned round to cover the edge of the trees and the doorway. I must admit I was thankful to be inside. I had never been asked to study forest fighting against the lunatic crashings of a poltergeist without a plan.

I suppose he continued beating the bounds for another quarter of an hour. Meanwhile, knowing that he was engaged outside, I took stock of the barn and freely used my torch in the corners which were out of sight of the doorway. During the afternoon I had merely glanced over the place with a view to making Nur Jehan comfortable, and had not examined it in detail.

In the lefthand wall as I faced the doorway was a long, narrow window, the sill of which was about six feet from the ground. A man entering from outside would make a good deal of noise, but it offered an easy way out from the inside, for there was a pile of loose hay beneath the window. The floor of the barn was fairly clear of obstructions, except for an old chaff-cutter, some bits of iron and balks of timber which had been part of a cart, and a pile of hazel rods close to the door. Against the back wall were three dilapidated stalls for horses or cattle.

At last there was silence under the trees. I lay down a little back from the doorway preparing for the final shot. After a while I heard a horse walking placidly over the turf of the clearing towards me. I suspected that St. Sabas was going to charge the door. It was not a bad idea if he thought that I was outside the barn and he wanted to get in through my covering fire. But I refused to be dazed by haute ecole stuff this time and I was not going to be caught on the ground again.

I stood up to get a level shot, for I could not be seen in the pitch darkness. But there was no change of pace, no sudden rush. Nur Jehan, his lighter color showing just in time through the gray-black of the entrance, walked into the barn, gave me a casual Judas kiss in passing and strolled into one of the stalls to see what, if anything, was in the manger. I prayed that St. Sabas did not know his habits. If he did, Nur Jehan had given away the fact that I was in the barn.

A minute later the mare followed, sidling through the doorway and very nervous. She got mixed up with a pillar and an old cart shaft and let out at the lot with her heels. It was plain that St. Sabas had driven her in to distract my attention —if I were inside —from his own approach. He succeeded in that. The crash made me as jumpy as the mare. I retreated a little from the door so that I could cover the window as well.

Then silence returned, broken only by the munching of the horses who had found something to their taste. Instinct told me that I ought to be really frightened, that the tiger was crouched for the spring. I refused to believe instinct. I could not afford to. Panic was very close. I kept on reminding myself that I must not risk being wounded and helpless. St. Sabas had not the three days which he had spent on the punishment of Dickfuss, but no doubt he would gladly spare an hour.

At last I heard a scuffling on the stone sill of the window on my left. That was more cheerful. If he were climbing in, there had to be a moment when his head and shoulders would be silhouetted against the lighter night sky and it would be his last. My hand was perfectly steady in spite of the uncontrollable beating of the heart.

The scuffle stopped. When it began again it sounded like a slipping boot but was too high up. I moved a step or two back from the window to get a clearer field of fire and met an unexpected barrel hoop under the scattering of hay, which rustled as I gently extricated my foot. Out to my right a torch and a shot flashed, one as fast as the other — and too fast. I fired back to each side of the flash. There was no apparent effect. Six in the Mauser against three in the Colt.

I did not think I had scored. In the close quarters of the barn it was impossible to hear what the bullets had struck. Something long and light fell as I fired. It was one of the long hazel rods. St. Sabas had used it for tickling the window sill. My instinct had been right. He was with me inside the barn.

So this was the position he wanted, where a savage recklessness would count for more than skill and a club be nearly as effective as a firearm. Now that it was too late his tactics made sense. The spectral referee of the two chessboards said nothing, but I was within a move of mate. All that aimless rushing about had been most effective psychological warfare, destroying my nerves until I was ready to seize upon any easy explanation of it.

He had indeed wanted to reach the barn, but not before he had hypnotized me into going inside it. He was not sure, I suppose, that I had really done so until Nur Jehan, fetched by him from the open hill, looked for me and found me. Then the rest of his plan, the closing of the trap, came into operation. He had entered the barn crouched behind the mare’s quarters. I should have remembered the cows and the stream.

My one idea now was to get out. That was partly due to shock at discovering myself so obedient to the enemy, partly to sheer terror because I dared not move so much as a coat sleeve in case he was within a couple of yards of me. I sank down slowly and squatted on my heels, afraid even so that a creak of the knees might give me away.

And then Nur Jehan screamed. It was utterly unnerving. A ghost or the sudden shriek of a mating vixen could not have been more weird and startling. I jumped round to face the horses without any regard at all for noise or cover. What in the devil’s name was this loathsome ruse, and how had he done it? He would draw the line at getting under Nur Jehan’s belly with a knife.

It was not till the stallion’s second scream that I realized what was happening. The mare plunged out through the door, Nur Jehan after her. So that was the cause of his restlessness; and I had no doubt what had broken the inhibiting link between himself and the kindly creatures who played with him and tried to train him. It was the scent of human fear.

I dropped to the ground, streaming sweat. Mrs. Melton’s odd words came back to me: that the same fate was on the horse and the goat in the same place. I was near to tears with the poignancy of it. I wanted to live, as Nur Jehan would, to enjoy that fate.

“A fine foal, von Dennim, I should think. Ah well, in the midst of death we are in life.”

The panting, but still ironical voice came from the far end of the barn on the other side of the door. Under cover of the excitement he had slipped out of my half. The speed of my two shots must have shaken his confidence. It was comforting to know that he hated the threat of such incalculable close quarters as much as I did.

I was sure that this conversational opening meant that he wanted to know whether he had hit or not. It was a good moment to choose. One leaps at a human word when recovering from near hysteria. But I did not reply.

“They’ll be very pleased at Chipping Marton, the vicar and all!” he went on. “What a charmingly passionate child! Even a Gestapo officer will do at her age … Missed again, von Dennim!”

The whine of a ricochet contemptuously emphasized it. I had been fool enough to fire two more shots at a voice certain to be under cover. Four in the Mauser now against three in the Colt.

A needed lesson. I reminded myself how I had made rings round this famous Savarin in the fields of Hernsholt. I must not be bluffed. I must never fire unless sure to hit. I must escape to the trees, and I must use my brains to get there. It was not going to be easy.

His night sight was as good as my own. If either of us attempted to crawl through the area of dark gray on the threshold of the door, he was dead. Within the recesses of the barn no night sight mattered at all. Our world was black.

His preference for the barn suggested that it was not the first time he had fought for his life in darkness. But in the battles of his guerrilla warfare he was festooned with full magazines for whatever weapon he used to spray his enemies. He could not use that technique. Past experience would not help to solve his ammunition problem. So we were equal. A sound had to be very promising indeed before either of us was likely to fire at it.

There were plenty of little sounds if one listened carefully — some made by rats, some by the settling of rotten wood and mortar after the plunging of the horses, some by St. Sabas. It was difficult for either of us to move quietly. He was wearing riding boots; I, ordinary boots and leather gaiters. Three or four steps might be completely muffled by patches of chaff or dung dried to powder, but the next crackled on noisier debris.

I was sure that St. Sabas had moved away from the far corner of the back wall where he had crouched to speak to me. He had crossed the barn to the front wall. An absolute silence from that direction —no rats, no movement — suggested that he was lying down in the angle of wall and floor close to the entrance, waiting for me to try to get out.