Watcher in the Shadows (6 page)

Two days after the death of the postman had been reported in the papers an Admiral Cunobel called at the house. He ceremoniously presented himself and his card, and regretted that Georgina was out. He had known both her and my parents in old days.

I asked him in and gave him a drink. I had not then received the pamphlet on which the Buchenwald officers’ mess was marked with a cross, and I was sure — almost — that the bomb could not have been meant for me. So I had no reason to be cautious with strangers.

I suspected that he might have something to do with the police. But it was not that at all. He was genuinely anxious about Georgina. He had lost track of her completely until he read of the zoologist and his aunt who taught riding. He had guessed — though he didn’t say so — that our simple life might be seriously disturbed by any emergency, and I think it had shocked him.

He was an arbitrary old charmer whom long years at sea had preserved from most modern thinking which was not professional. As he perched himself on the edge of my desk with a tumbler of pink gin beside him, he resembled a young tortoise eagerly exploring a new lettuce bed. The beak, the jowls and the leathery skin were unmistakable tortoise, but the sprightliness of pale blue eyes and dark blue suit suggested that he still enjoyed himself.

“As a matter of fact, we have met before,” he said.

“I ought to remember, but…”

“No, you oughtn’t! You were two weeks old! In 1912 I was Assistant Naval Attache in Vienna, and your mother was extraordinarily kind to me. Those were the days, my lad! None of this nationalism except among the lower classes! A man chose the side he would play for like a county cricketer. County of birth or county of residence—whichever he pleased —but he had to stick to it. I knew your Uncle Willi, who fought for the Tsar in the Imperial Guards, and your Uncle Fritz, who called himself a Bavarian and was killed before Verdun. And Hildegard, who married a Greek and nearly got shot by both sides for helping prisoners to escape. And your dear Aunt Georgina, who, I don’t mind telling you, would have married me if she hadn’t fallen in love with her second cousin, the English Dennim. What a horseman he was! Delightful boy, too! Good Lord, he’d be seventy-three now if he hadn’t died of wounds on the Somme!”

He went on and on, and I mentioned my surprise that he could remember all the ramifications of my family.

“Had to, my boy! Came under the head of useful information in those days. If you weren’t in the studbook yourself, the next best tiring was to know who was. I remember fretting about it with your mother. It’s all tradition, she said, and none of us can prove more than half of it. I’ll fix you up, she said — Cunobel from Cunobelinus. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Oldest pedigree in Europe, if only you could fit a few missing pieces into the puzzle. And damned if she didn’t get Georgina to spread the rumor! God bless my soul, the Cunobels are a sound Cornish family, but small, small! But it was just like your parents. Anyone they liked had got to have everything they could give.”

I liked him very much, and we went out to lunch at his club. There, after doing me very well, he ventured onto the subject of Georgina and the bomb. It must have been a shock. Had she anywhere to go for a holiday? He owed the Dennims the happiest two years of his life. Did I think he might pick up old friendship?

I said that I was sure he might, but that Georgina could be very difficult if she suspected that anything was being arranged for her behind her back. She was extremely proud of her independence and did not care if she gave the impression of a hard woman. That made her easy to live with. She neither permitted her privacy to be invaded nor intruded upon that of anyone else.

The admiral explained that he was a bachelor — which of course made it unthinkable that Georgina should stay under his roof. I did not dare to smile. And in a way he was right. In spite of the fact that she was over sixty and he well over seventy, their vitality was such that any healthy and normal village would at once create a joyous legend about them.

No, what he had in mind was that she should stay as his guest, but with the vicar —where she would be doing him a great favor as well.

“The man’s in a mess,” he said. “He could do with some help.”

I indicated that Georgina’s general air and outspokenness might be disconcerting to a strange vicar.

“Blood and bones, boy, I didn’t mean sewing his surplices!” the admiral exclaimed. “He’s taken to horse-breeding!”

“With an eye on the 2.30?”

“No, no, no! A crazy parishioner left him his pet Arab stallion. Keeps it in the glebe meadow! Not even properly fenced! Too long a story —but the poor fellow is spending all his money on oats, and he and his daughter have to live on porridge. Well, Georgi might make some sense out of it. I’m bothered sick about the vicar, and I can’t keep an eye on everything which goes on in the village any longer.”

When I reported to Georgina in the evening that Admiral Cunobel had called on her and taken me out to lunch instead, I detected a sudden aura and fragrance of femininity. How, I don’t know. She neither fluttered nor giggled. I suspect that she immediately saw herself in a ball dress of 1912 and projected the image. She had been a very beautiful girl.

She invited the admiral to tea. This was a ceremony. Her friends and mine occasionally took a meal with us, but we had no pretensions; they ate whatever there was and drank a glass or two of wine as a symbol of hospitality. About twice a year, however, Georgi formally invited somebody to tea. She polished the silver tea service, made a number of tiny cakes and two big ones, cut paper-thin bread and butter in white and brown, and prepared every single offering proper to the tea cult of the older landed gentry. The illusion was complete. The parlormaid in dainty cap and apron so obviously brought in the silver tray and the muffins that it was an effort to remember one had not actually seen her.

By the afternoon of the tea party I had received the letter from my Austrian friend and knew what I was in for. I was most anxious to get clear of London and have room to defend myself. I was determined that the admiral’s invitation should be accepted, for I could not leave Georgina alone in the house. Quite apart from unknown risks, tarpaulins, dust and scaffolding were depressing. The minor damage done by the bomb had revealed that the Victorian woodwork of the house front was rotten and ought to be replaced.

Peregrine Cunobel’s tactful command was perfect. I could see how he had become an admiral. When the conversation had drifted away from 1912 he soon had it firmly anchored to country life and the church.

“If the parsons can’t get a living wage,” he said, “they have to do what they can — grow flowers for the market or turn the vicarage into a guest house. Mine thinks he can breed horses.”

And then he gave us an enchanting picture of the young stallion, Nur Jehan, which aroused Georgina’s curiosity and challenged it. She had gentled horses which had been stupidly or cruelly broken, but had never attempted to discipline a horse which had been brought up as a pet.

When I added that I myself had long been wanting to study a whole colony of squirrels of which I had heard, she agreed that the house would be lonely. And that was that. She accepted Cunobel’s invitation to Chipping Marton.

It was from the vicarage that she was telephoning. She hoped I would come over for the week end and stay on indefinitely if I wasn’t bored. Dear Peregrine had already written to me. I gathered from the adjective that she was enjoying herself.

Her pungent chronicle of the doings of the vicar and Nur Jehan made good listening, but I found it difficult to remain patient while keeping an eye on the two windows which commanded the telephone. She did not return to the question of why I had not given her my address — which was typical —and repeatedly wanted to know if I was all right and comfortable, which was not typical at all. I managed to avoid a definite reply to the invitation. I hoped that by the week end I should be a free man, and should have given the police the name and description of the postman’s murderer.

I felt quite certain that he would not lose all the advantages he had gained by speed. He had only failed to get me owing to the unforeseeable accident of the dog, and he could not be aware that he had aroused any suspicion whatever.

What had started as Ian’s crude goat and tiger was now beginning to have more resemblance to the German Intelligence chess, in which a player never sees his opponent’s men at all. He is told by a referee when a move is impossible and when he has taken or lost a piece. From that he must construct his own picture of the squares which are occupied and the pattern occupying them.

What was the enemy’s picture? That the police might have advised me to go into hiding, but that they were giving me as yet little or no protection on the ground. In that case the more he delayed, the more risk he was running. Today, Thursday, by nightfall he ought to be miles away from Hernsholt, unsuspected and satisfied that I was dead.

What was my picture? That he was so close on top of me that I must play for getting a look at his face without provoking an attack or alarming him. The latter was most important. I did not want him to break contact and wait weeks or months for an easier chance.

If he were on the Long Down watching the front of the house, it should be possible to see him from the upstairs windows. Presumably he was well aware of that and did not dare to scratch himself or blow a fly off his nose unless he knew where I was.

So I let him know. I took out a deck chair through the front door, went back again for a book, a table and a pile of manuscript, and settled down under cover of the shrubbery — apparently to work. I then returned to the house on my stomach by way of the ditch and the back door.

Hidden behind the bedroom curtains I searched the Long Down with my glasses. There wasn’t a sign of him. I gave him up. Perhaps I had exaggerated his energy; perhaps he had decided to be as slow and careful as in London. I took to watching a hare which was hopping along the skyline two hundred yards away.

Now, a hare only sees at the last moment what is in front of him; he can see with very little effort what is behind. So when he jinked and galloped off at an angle to his feeding course I knew the exact spot where something had frightened him. Through the glasses I picked up a shadowy black thread behind the waving grass. It was the top of the entrance to an old air-raid shelter.

I had missed it in my own explorations of the Long Down because I was mainly interested in routes. There was no urgent need to map out the points from which an attack might be made. In any case the shelter was not at all obvious. It had been sunk deep into the clay, and the curve of the roof did not show above ground. Possibly it was meant for the special security of V.I.P.s arriving at the airfield.

Whether my own particular V.I.P. was in it at the moment I could not be sure. Standing on the steps of the shelter with his eyes at ground level he could look out with little chance of being spotted by me or anyone else. It was fortunate that he did not want to be seen carrying a rifle about. Or perhaps he felt that a shot at two hundred yards was too much of a gamble.

After a while I detected movement which suggested the top of a head. I could have stalked him from behind, but I had not a scrap of evidence against him. The person in the shelter might have been a retired bishop writing a monograph on the reproduction cycle of the hare. So I wondered if he would take an opportunity to show his intentions. I worked my way back to the shrubbery and returned openly to the house with my deck chair and papers.

Fussing with notebooks and binoculars and making a show of an innocent naturalist off for a walk, I set out by the front gate, rounded the garden and skirted the edge of the Long Down close to his shelter. I was aiming for a lane running straight to the west for quarter of a mile which would allow me to see if I were followed. By the time I was approaching the end of the straight, there were two men behind me and a woman on a bicycle. One of the men was a biggish fellow and coming along at a good pace. I hoped he was the right one.

The lane brought me on to the main Aylesbury road, along which I walked for half a mile. He was still behind me, but that proved nothing. I took a turning to the right leading gently uphill to the village of Stoke. If he, too, came to Stoke it would be a strong indication that he was following me, for the route was roundabout. Whoever he was, he had come from the Long Down and the shortest way from there to Stoke was through Hernsholt.

A quick glance through the leaves of the hedgerow showed him two curves behind and coming up fast. So, on reaching Stoke, I hesitated outside the church to admire one of those squat, square towers which make the English landscape but have no other aesthetic value, and then went inside. I hoped that he would also pretend an interest in ecclesiastical architecture and that I should have a chance for a good look at him. But he was content to wait.

On my way out I stopped to chat with the first person I saw, so that I could walk through the churchyard keeping my eyes open but apparently deep in conversation. He turned out to be the gravedigger and by no means a merry one. He informed me that in the midst of life we are in death and that they ought to ‘ave cremation wherever the blue clay wasn’t no more than four feet down. Press a button, like. By the time I had recovered from the superstitions of an Austrian nursery the feet which had padded after me were strolling away from the church.

I had not thought out what was going to happen now or where I should go. Obviously he could not trail me indefinitely through a network of lanes. If he came close enough to see what turnings I took he would arouse suspicion. If I let him follow me without noticing him, so should I.

The best game for the moment seemed to be to lose him. What would he do then? Return to the Long Down presumably, or perhaps visit the cottage in my absence and attend again to the larder. In either case he would take the shortest way and, if I could get ahead of him, I should at last be able to see his face.