Watcher in the Shadows (4 page)

What about the plasterer, painter and carpenter working on the house? It was an obvious place for the police to plant an agent. He’d have to be careful with them. Still, if he were patient and prepared to watch the men home he could be pretty sure that they were what they appeared to be. When at last he risked a question, it would give him what he wanted to know. In a great hurry on leaving the house and pretending to be nervous about gutters and the horrid little portico over the front door I had made a disastrous slip and given the carpenter my real address.

It would take time to pick up the clue; but I counted on the care and patience with which he had arranged the execution of Hans Weber. I reckoned that he would spend at least a couple of weeks in finding out the address, arranging a base for himself and avoiding possible traps. Meanwhile I could familiarize myself with the country and watch badgers.

The cottage which Ian had rented for me was in North Buckinghamshire, in the parish of Hernsholt and about a mile from the village. Far away to the north and east stretched the blue-hazed plain of the south Midlands — elm and oak as far as the eye could reach.

It was, in fact, fairly open pasture, neatly and thickly hedged, with only a few small coverts where foxes bred under the clatter of wood pigeons; but seldom were there fifty yards of hedge without a great tree. Seen over a distance, as from my bedroom window, England seemed to have returned to the temperate forest out of which the Saxons cut and cultivated their holdings. I felt a deeper sympathy for that solid race of pioneers — because I too was still searching for home — than most native English. They have a romantic passion for the still older strains in their ancestry.

The cottage was known as the Warren. It belonged to a widow who had gone out to stay with a son in Australia, and it was still ladylike even when I had packed away all breakable ornaments. It had electricity, a telephone, and a water supply piped from a spring at the back.

Around the spring was a copse of willows. It gave little real cover except at night, but I did not care for it until my eyes were accustomed to its light and shadow. In front of the cottage was a half acre of overgrown garden and, beyond it, the Long Down —a stretch of well-drained upland which had been an airfield during the war. The desolate concrete runways, the air-raid shelters and the aircraft bays were still there. Over and among them sheep and cattle pastured.

Though it was only fifty miles from London my retreat gave such an impression of quiet remoteness that I began to doubt whether the goat could be found. An address written in a casual workman’s notebook seemed a slender connection with me. Yet it was certain that the tiger would haunt my suburb and finally risk approaching the empty house when every other line of inquiry had failed. When he followed me he should be noticeable. The district was without holiday-makers to confuse the issue. There was nothing to do but farm, breed horses or fatten cattle.

I spent the first few days completing a fast and thorough reconnaissance of my surroundings. I made no mystery of myself —and the badgers were there in plenty to account for my movements. I decided to have no observable communication with Ian, not even by telephone. His formidable past was too widely known, and I wanted to appear friendless and unprotected to any investigator.

We did, however, have an optional rendezvous at a bridge over the slow Claydon Brook on Ian’s normal road to and from Buckingham. At four every afternoon he proposed to drive across it. In the stream was a willow snag which he could see from his car. If it had its usual trailer of dead water weed all was well and there was nothing to report. If it was clear of weeds I was waiting close by for an opportunity to talk.

That Wednesday morning, the fifth day since my arrival, was a perfection of English summer. The new leaves of the great pear-shaped trees which closed the horizon hung motionless, awaiting the first trial of heat. After coffee and bacon I idled in the garden, feeling inclined to take a hoe and discourage the weeds like a good tenant instead of doing a third exploration of the Long Down.

The Long Down was important. It would be my main line of communication as soon as there was any suspicious sign of interest in me. I was certainly not going to risk the lane which led to my cottage, bordered by thick hedges on both sides. But moving across the disused airfield I could always be sure that I was not followed; and if I had reason to think I was, I could vanish among the aircraft bays and the low brick foundations, overgrown by brambles, where huts had once been. It would be impossible to tell by what path I intended to leave the down or whether I had not already left it.

I decided to weed. I wanted to discourage the dog. It belonged, I was told, to some feckless woman on the far side of the Long Down who worked in a factory at Wolverton and might or might not return home at night. She left the animal outside her cottage with a dirty plate of bread and stale canned dog food. No one would have been surprised if she had expected it to open the cans. The dog spent its days on the down, pouncing disconsolately on beetles, and was delighted to find a companion with nothing obvious and agricultural to do.

I might as well have reconnoitered my territory waving a red flag as followed by this unavoidable dog, which had the bounce of a terrier and the reproachful affection of a spaniel, both very evidently among its ancestors. It was not trainable. Even if it had been, no dog — except a poacher’s lurcher — can move as silently as a man.

So I spent that gently blazing morning in the garden, and in the afternoon took a bus to Bletchley. I wanted to familiarize myself with the likely routes to and from the station. My very vaguely formed picture of the enemy’s character suggested that he might avoid the risk of car number plates, whether true or false, and use the railway. In any case he would soon find out that I avoided roads and that in following my movements between the cottage and the badgers a car was no help. I myself would have liked to borrow one; but I had no car in London — both Georgina and I with our limited incomes preferred wine to petrol — and it might have appeared unnatural suddenly to have private transport at my disposal in the country.

I did my shopping in Bletchley and returned to the cottage with veal cutlets, new potatoes and peas. Then, feeling the need of human society with which to share my thirst and the beauty of the evening, I strolled up the lane to my village of Hernsholt and entered the Haunch of Mutton.

Ferrin, the landlord, was alone. He was a thin, ironical man in his early fifties, with an air of knowing the utter worthlessness of humanity and enjoying it all the same. He was generally smiling and silent, but occasionally produced a comment as devastating as that of some nihilistic cartoonist. The habit was good for trade. Local customers would sit over a second drink in the hope of being shocked by whatever Mr. Ferrin might say next.

He served me with a long whisky and soda, and watched me till the glass was nearly empty.

“Like it down here?” he asked.

I said I did, and that it was a peaceful spot.

“Too peaceful for business.”

“They watch the telly instead, I suppose?”

“That won’t last long,” he said. “But they’ll soon find something else to stop ‘em thinking. It’s all up with the pubs and the churches. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear of a take-over bid from one or the other any day now.”

I replied that I didn’t much care which admirable tradition ran the other so long as it wasn’t the popular press. That seemed to please him, but he still returned to probing me.

“My father used to swear there was nothing like a badger ham. You’d be all against that, I expect?”

“Not a bit. But I shouldn’t kill in a sett which I was watching. It spoils the fun.”

“Breakfast is breakfast and science is science, like?”

“Exactly.”

“Have another on the house,” he said, refilling my glass without waiting for an answer. “You should try the bitter some time. It’s a small brewery and it don’t put water in the beer to pay for the advertising. Colonel Parrow is one of the directors. That’s how I come to be here.”

It seemed wise to take advantage of this marvelously oblique approach to my character and my business while we were still alone, though I did not know what story Ian had told him.

“You were under the colonel in the war?” I asked.

“Not under him and not over him, in a manner of speaking. I was mess sergeant in one of his hush-hush joints. And you’d be surprised what I used to hear once they got into the habit of not stopping talking when I came round with the drinks. But if I’d asked a question they’d have hung me from a parachute and dropped me on Hitler. That’s what I told Isaac Purvis.”

“Who’s he?”

“Works on the roads for the District Council. You said good morning to him the other day when he was clearing a ditch in Satters Bottom.”

“I remember. A little dried-up chap in his sixties.”

“Seventies, more like. Well, day before yesterday a stranger comes up to him and asks which we called the Nash road. Is that of any interest to you?”

I have always been sure that if England were ever occupied its people would find the organization of underground cells an almost effortless means of self-expression. On the surface they are so open, and yet so naturally and unconsciously secretive about anything which is of real importance to them.

“Yes,” I answered. “But there are four other houses along the Nash road besides my cottage. Was Mr. Purvis able to find out which he wanted?”

“No. He couldn’t keep him —though he’s a rare one for conversation. Lucky if you get away after half an hour of the Council’s time! But he noticed the chap didn’t go to the Worralls. And I saw Slade and Parish last night, and he didn’t go there. So that only leaves you and Mrs. Bunn —who never has a visitor, I’d say, but the vicar and the district nurse.”

“What sort of man was he?”

“Big, dark, clean-shaven.”

“A foreigner?”

“No. A gentleman, Isaac Purvis said.”

On my leisurely way back to the cottage I decided that the inquirer had been someone out for an innocent walk who had asked his way earlier and had been told to take the Nash road. It was far too early for the arrival of the tiger.

What kind of man was Isaac Purvis describing? It seemed odd that one couldn’t be both a foreigner and a gentleman. I vaguely understood what he meant from continental parallels, but Aunt Georgina would have been on surer ground.

Any of the younger generation who still used the outdated term at all would probably mean by “gentleman” a person who was well-spoken and apparently well-educated. But I had a feeling that in the mouth of an old and prejudiced agricultural laborer accustomed to judge from unconscious depths of instinct and experience, the word implied the manner and clothes of someone born to the ownership of the land. That suggested the phrase in my Austrian friend’s letter — a man with plenty of money and unlimited time at his disposal.

On the other hand, surely my enemy could not be English? But Isaac Purvis would be unreliable on that point. He was an authority on manner, not on accent and sentence rhythm. It was most improbable that anyone in the district could guess that I myself, for example, was of foreign birth —though a careful listener with some knowledge of other languages might detect it.

All the same, I reminded myself that any doubt was still a doubt and that it might be wise to act as if my cell had passed me a preliminary warning. I avoided the Nash road and the short track which led from it to the Warren. I went home across the fields, passing cautiously through the willow screen to my back door.

The evening sun flooded into the kitchen through the open window. All the sounds were peaceful. Under the window the mongrel from the Long Down was snoring. Above it a bee and two bluebottles were noisily trying to get out in the one place where it was impossible. A chewed mess of brown paper and string was on the floor. The veal cutlets which I had left on the kitchen table were inside that damned dog — as for a moment I called it.

I think I had already opened my mouth to rouse it from its stertorous slumber when I realized that its position under the window, its f ailing asleep instead of escaping with the loot, its continuing to sleep when I was an angry foot away from it were all wholly unnatural. I backed out through the door, remembering that the executioner of Sporn, Dickfuss and Weber liked to be in at the death.

The summer silence was still absolute, except for the cawing of a rook. I disappeared into the willow copse, keeping the house between myself and the garden, and reached the shelter of the boundary hedge. A deep ditch, taking the water which poured off the Long Down after rain as well as the winter overflow of the spring, bounded three sides of the garden. Very slowly I followed this round to the front gate and back again, inspecting every shrub and patch of cover where a man could crouch and keep the cottage under observation. I had no intention whatever of surprising him, for I had foolishly left the pistol in my suitcase under my bed. I merely wanted to satisfy myself that he was not in the house.

There was nothing to be gained by funking the next step. I had produced the situation I intended to produce. If I cleared out now or ran dithering to the police I should merely have a quite illusory period of peace while the big, dark, clean-shaven gentleman occupied himself with his presumably gentlemanly pursuits and waited.

I took the carving knife from the kitchen and a rolled-up rug for a shield. Then I went through those upstairs rooms with all the old technique I could remember—flinging open each door, guarding my back and letting the rug enter first. There was no doubt that on my own ground I was alone.

Having recovered that miserable .22 I sat down in the living room, first brushing the chair with my hands. I could very well be finished off by the schoolboy trick of a drawing-pin in my seat. But that was carrying imagination a little far. I ordered myself not to overdo precautions. Steady routines would be indispensable and sufficient — like shaking out boots in the tropics before putting them on.