Watcher in the Shadows (7 page)

Thought of the larder reminded me that I was very hungry. I bought some biscuits in the village shop. When I came out he was at the other end of the street, looking at a rack of picture postcards hung up in the entrance to the post office.

As I started to walk in his direction he went on ahead, taking the road I expected. He may have intended that I should pass him. Once clear of Stoke, the road ran between high hedges and was little used, especially at lunchtime. He would not have dared to allow himself time for any luxurious revenge, but a quick killing and a getaway across the fields was easy.

Now at last my choice of open country was paying off. I vanished into the courtyard of a pub, passed through it and through the kitchen garden into a field beyond. There, under cover of a haystack, I took a quick look at the inch ordnance map. As I thought, there were no obstacles and the contours favored me. If I hurried I could get ahead of him.

I was out of breath and bleeding from barbed wire and hawthorn when I reached the road from Stoke to Hernsholt. I found as good a place as his own on the Long Down. I could watch him coming along the road until he reached a bend, and I could then slither down to the hedge and see him pass me on the other side of it at a distance of two or three yards.

I ate my biscuits in peace, for he took a long time to arrive. He may have guessed that I had gone into the pub and waited for me to come out. At last I saw him, the pair of us separated only by a thin screen of wych-elm.

The man who passed me was utterly unlike my mental picture of him. He could have taken a room opposite my house and never been suspected. Dressed as a high civil servant, with umbrella and briefcase, he might have passed with a nod through any police cordon which was guarding me. Isaac Purvis’s description of him as a gentleman was right. He belonged to what it is the fashion to call the Establishment — though I have never had a satisfactory definition of what the devil, if anything, the Establishment means.

His age was close to my own, between forty and forty-five. He wore a brown tweed suit of excellent cloth and a lighter brown cap. His hair — so far as I could see it — was dark, and graying at the temples. He was a heavy man, six feet tall and weighing all of thirteen stone, but moving lightly with a hint of well-trained muscles. For the minor details — his nose was strong and regular, his eyes brown, and he had marked, untidy black eyebrows.

I was sure I had never seen him before. I couldn’t have forgotten such a man, however emaciated, if he had been a prisoner in Buchenwald. And his nationality was, on the face of it, obviously British. But he might not be. I couldn’t say why. Manner when alone, perhaps. I wanted a little more eccentricity from him. An Englishman of that class plays with his thoughts when he is alone and only looks formal if there is someone to see him.

On the other hand, he had no variety of thoughts to play with. He had only one. I never saw such a set and concentrated expression; he might have been tracking me one single bend of the road behind me. And the spring when he caught up would be as deadly as any tiger’s — merciless, for that man believed he was executing those whom the law had not considered quite worthy of death. Yet a general motive was not enough to account for such patience and dedication. There must surely be a precise and personal motive. What was it? I expected to know as soon as I saw him, but I still did not.

It was now that a plan occurred to me, partly because I was close to one of the badger setts which were my cover for staying in the district, partly because I was most reluctant to spend another night at the Warren.

My intention was to trap him unhurt — or only slightly hurt. The case against him for the murder of the postman was building up. He must have been seen in my suburb, and here he was again on my tail. Looking at it, however, from a weary inspector’s point of view, there was still no evidence but the word of an ex-Gestapo officer who very deservedly saw things under his bed, and could give no clear and sane motive for being persecuted by someone who was not in Buchenwald — or, indeed, by anyone who was.

If this fellow was of irreproachable character and standing — which was the impression he gave me —he could not be arrested, only questioned and then carefully watched while his description was circulated to German police. That was not good enough. That would not put him out of action and give me freedom from fear.

Clear evidence. A charge upon which he could be held in jail while full investigation of him was made. Those were what I must have. And if he would kindly look back once more to see if I were coming along the road behind him, I thought I could get them.

I gave him three minutes, then climbed a gate into the road and followed. I felt pretty safe. There was no reason for him to hang about or double back. What he ought to do before giving me up altogether was to sit down in comfort by a line of firs above and to the right of the road. From there he could probably see Stoke and certainly see me, strolling innocently along right into that shot from the hedge which I had so dreaded the night before.

I did not oblige him by going all the way, but turned off to the left along a field path. The country was open. If he were up among the firs he could see all my movements through his glasses — a most expensive pair which I envied — until I arrived at the patchy cover where the badger sett was.

It was a typical badger fortress, under a tangled mass of thorn and blackberry about twenty yards long, which ran at right angles to a muddy stream. If I had really been intending to study the two or three families which lived in it — there were too many runways for easy observation — I should have crossed the stream and squatted wetly among the rushes to watch them drink and possibly play. But that was an impossible place to tie out the goat for the tiger.

At the other end of this thick wall of vegetation, and a few feet away from it, was a solitary, stunted alder. I cut and twisted a few branches to form a seat in the tree. To make it perfectly clear what I was doing I sat in it and tested it. I also took out my notebook and jotted down details of the badger paths and scratching trees. All the time I was careful to remain in sight of the firs on the higher ground.

But my guess that he was there proved wrong. My guess that he was watching me was right. That was typical of all our moves, his as well as mine. There were too many ifs, and each of us was inclined to mistake a queen for a pawn.

While I was working on the alder, something disturbed the birds upstream where the banks were overgrown. I paid no attention. A couple of minutes later I went round to the other side of the badger fortress, found a place where the vegetation was thin and searched the stream with my glasses. He was there all right, and he had not come down from the firs or I would have seen him. He must have been waiting for me where the road crossed the stream — an admirable place for the temporary disposal of a body. When I turned off into the footpath I had been dangerously close.

So long as he saw me, I did not care where he saw me from. I hoped that all this preparation of the tree would not puzzle him. He looked the sort of person who would recognize a badger sett —he could take it for a fox’s earth if he liked — and would realize that I meant to watch whatever was there from the alder after sunset. It was wildly improbable that he would suspect the truth; that the alder was futile for observation and that I had chosen it because I could be stalked with such ease up the blind side of the fortress.

At last I walked away downstream, leaving him to examine at leisure what I had been up to. When I was out of his sight I broke into a trot, for I had only half an hour to reach the rendezvous with Ian, whose help was essential.

I reached the bridge in time and was just about to go down to the willow snag and clear away the tail of dead water weed undulating in the slow current when I saw old Isaac Purvis leisurely scything the young nettles on the green verge of the road. His bicycle leaned against the hedge —a marvel how the old boy could cycle for miles with the scythe wrapped in sacking over his shoulder — and he appeared to have started on a job which the Rural District Council could well have left till July.

He leaned on his scythe when he saw me hesitate at the bridge, his whole attitude an invitation to join him and talk.

“Nettles are coming on fast this year, Mr. Purvis,” I remarked.

“Grass is what I were cutting,” the old man answered, “a goodish step back, t’other side of the bridge.”

He waited with mischievous eyes to be asked why he had moved. So I did ask.

“You go on up the road, Purvis, says Colonel Parrow, and if you sees the perfesser you give ‘im this ‘ere!”

He slid into my hand a sheet torn from a notebook as neatly as if he were passing a betting slip under the eye of a policeman.

I have a feeling you may want to see me today. I shall he at the bridge about half past four. There’s another report of the stranger whom Ferrin mentioned to you, and I am trying to account for him.

“Very kind of you, Mr. Purvis,” I said.

“It was them Boers what started it,” he remarked obscurely. “Never ‘eard of ‘em again we wouldn’t, if ‘tweren’t for the Kaiser and ‘Itler.”

I had to trunk that one out. There was a sort of mad logic in it, for British insolence and weakness in the Boer War — or so I believe myself — were both partly responsible for 1914.

“You fought in South Africa?” I asked.

“Ah. Yeomanry. And me bowels never been the same since.”

I agreed that the campaign must have been frightening.

“Went down with enteric, I did, like all me troop. And I’ll tell you what cured me though you won’t ‘ardly believe it. I was ridin’ along scarcely ‘oldin’ on me ‘orse when one of them bloody Boers ups and shoots me through the guts. And when I gets to ‘ospital I ‘ear the doctor say: Well, we ain’t got to bother about perforation now, ‘e says, because ‘e’s perforated. I didn’t rightly know what ‘e meant, but I says hallelujah for me luck and I gets well. So when Colonel says to me: It’s a question of atomy, Purvis, I says: Well, they won’t get un, Colonel, not them Boers nor the Americans neither.”

It looked as if Ian had thought that a zoologist was insufficiently melodramatic for his village. If atomy was what I supposed — it seemed an excellent word — I was evidently a professor with some unspecified interest in nuclear fission.

“What did you think of this big, dark man who wanted to know which was the Nash road?” I asked as soon as I could get a word in.

“A pleasant-spoken gentleman,” said Isaac Purvis, as if that was about as far as he could safely go. “Put me in mind of old Worrall, ‘e did.”

“How do you mean exactly?”

“Old Worrall who ‘ad the farm opposite where you’re a-staying. I used to work for ‘im as carter thirty year ago, and I can see ‘im as plain as I sees you. Just as pleasant as ever, ‘e was, after ‘is eldest son ‘ad been took to the mad’ouse, and you’d ‘ave reckoned ‘e thought nothing of it. But one day ‘e says to me: God Almighty is goin’ to pay me for that, Isaac.”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. What was there to ‘appen? ‘Is eyes were what I meant. Like a widder’s eyes when the parson tells ‘er that sufferin’ is good for ‘er.”

That vivid phrase brought back my unreasonable sense of guilt, which had been dispersed by fear and anger. Poor devil — if he believed I was the same sort of creature as Sporn and Dickfuss, he had a right to kill me. How long is it since revenge was considered a virtue in a man of honor? A mere three hundred years?

I asked Purvis if he had any reason to think that the big, dark man was a foreigner.

“Well, all I’ve seen of ‘im was three days back. I tells ’im what ‘e wants to know. And then I asks ‘im if ‘e weren’t the new undertaker what Mrs. Bunn wishes to make ‘er own bargain with. ‘E just says that ‘e weren’t.

“I knew as ‘e weren’t. ‘E was just out for a walk in a manner of speakin’. But I says to myself afterwards, I says, now if ‘e was the kind of gentleman what ain’t in a ‘urry and goes walkin’ when ‘e could do it easier in ‘is motor car, then ‘e’d like to ‘ear about Mrs. Bunn making ‘er own arrangements with the undertaker. So I wouldn’t say ‘e ain’t a foreigner and I wouldn’t say as ‘e is.

Mr. Purvis was willing to discuss till five o’clock the character of Englishmen — by which he meant the inhabitants of Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. That was perhaps a long time to stand chatting in the open when I did not know where our gentleman had gone, but I did not wish to offend so useful an assistant by cutting him short.

At half past four Ian arrived. We drove off in his car. He seemed a little cold and military because he could not find a certain Jim Melton for whom he had been looking. The only time you could be sure of seeing the blasted man, I gathered, was when he was going into the magistrates’ court to pay a fine for some minor offense or coming out again; and then if you didn’t catch him on the court steps he vanished. An enviable gift, I thought.

Ian wanted me to go with him to Buckingham and have a leisurely dinner somewhere afterwards. When I told him to park the car by the roadside and settle down with me under a convenient haystack, he said he could not see why I found boy-scouting necessary. It was an effort to remember that he knew nothing of the last agitated twenty hours.

I gave him my story from the time I had left the Haunch of Mutton the night before. He did not interrupt. He was always a patient and practiced listener, though one never knew what explosion there might be at the end.

“But you’d got him cold!” he exclaimed. “Why on earth didn’t you hold him up in his bunker or on the road?”

I reminded him that I dared not shoot. There was no evidence to connect this harmless stroller in the brown tweed suit with the dog or with any attempt on me. I might have a fearful time clearing myself if I killed him. And one of us would almost certainly be killed. The fellow was capable of being just as dangerous as any wounded tiger. Even if I could drill him through the shoulder or shoot his gun out of his hand — and I was too long out of practice to be sure of either —my .22 wouldn’t stop him.