Watcher in the Shadows (9 page)

Ian yelled and struggled to get out of his tunnel. The big, dim figure under the alder jumped back, evidently startled that there was another person present. In half a dozen strides he had merged himself again with the darkness at the lower end of the badger fortress, where he seemed to hesitate. Then I heard him splosh across the stream. I just had time and enough sense to whisper to Ian, who was three-quarters out of his hole, that he should talk loudly about frightening the badgers and ask me what the hell I thought I was doing.

It took me a painful ten minutes to extricate myself with the aid of the clippers. I couldn’t go up, and I could only sink down by degrees. When at last I was standing on earth, striped all over by superficial scratches, I had to get out feet first by way of Ian’s hole.

Why the tiger should have mistrusted the obvious and expected line of approach I did not then know, but I was on the right fines when I wondered how much he had seen of naturalists and their ways. How he had come up was clear. He had very slowly and cautiously moved among the cows, never startling them but gradually shifting them down to the water. That, as Ian pointed out, was not so easy. It was another slight indication that Isaac Purvis’s gentleman really did own or farm land.

When one of the cows was squelching through the soft ground he had crossed the stream under cover of its steps and landed on a small patch at the southeast corner of the fortress which was clear of bushes and hidden from the alder. I had entirely overlooked that vital little sector of turf. Even if there had been cows in the meadow during the afternoon, I am sure that its possibilities would never have occurred to me.

Once safely across, he had waited some time to make out my outline. The whole length of the badger fortress was too long a range for a pistol at night. He may have raised and lowered it half a dozen times before deciding that he couldn’t afford the risk of missing. When I shifted my legs he thought that I was off for home and that his opportunity would be lost. So he charged in. I was at his mercy. I had no time to drop out of the tree and start running.

While we were looking for his footprints in the mud we came across a charred patch of dead bramble on the edge of the stream where the leaf dust was still smouldering. There was only one conceivable explanation of this. He had stopped for a moment in his escape to light a scrap of paper from his pocket and push it into the dry debris. It didn’t work. If he had had time and a newspaper it would have worked. The wind was right. The dead bramble and the old, dry badger bedding would have gone up and consumed the whole fortress in one roar of flame while I was still stuck in it. Such concentration of cruelty and hatred left us both shaken. I don’t think he could have been inspired to fire the bramble on the spur of the moment. I have no doubt at all that he had planned that end for me during the afternoon. A crippling, not a killing shot. Then tie my feet and heave me into the bush. Then light the debris at leisure.

“Still about, do you think?” Ian asked.

“No. He can’t tell what may be closing in ahead of him. By God, I hope the police pick him up!”

“At any rate we have enough evidence now.”

But had we? Yes, provided there were good grounds for connecting him with my suburb and the postman, and provided that German police, a day or two later, could prove his presence in Germany at the time of the three executions. Ourselves, we could not prove much. Suppose he claimed that he, too, was interested in badger setts? Suppose he apologized for disturbing us and said that for some unknown reason I seemed very nervous? He could be quite convincing if he had a good excuse for staying in the neighborhood.

“We shan’t hear of him again for some time if he gets clear,” Ian said.

That was true enough. I hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry. It meant that the initiative had once more passed to the tiger and that I should have to start all over again.

I went home with Ian, thankful that he was a bachelor and that I did not have to do any explaining. His reason for never marrying was, I think, not very different from my own — too occupied during the war by the terrible strain of protecting and sometimes sacrificing his agents, and after that too occupied by a sense of guilt.

The police had nothing to report — no man on foot, no parked car on any of the roads leading away from the Long Down. Ian’s friend, the chief constable, evidently thought that hunches were better left to Scotland Yard.

Isaac Purvis had done rather better by leaning on a cousin’s garden fence and quietly ruminating. At half past ten the dark gentleman had passed him, walking quite casually. On reaching the outskirts of Hernsholt he had turned right, away from the village, which made it pretty certain that he was aiming for the safe, deserted expanse of the Long Down and intended to reach it by the path which led round the bottom of my garden.

I slept late that Friday morning and lay in bed wondering how far pride and shame —in my case difficult to distinguish — had been responsible for this single-handed attempt to protect myself. Yet I had so nearly succeeded. By this move to the country, by the selection of my own ground for the trap and the placing and baiting of it, I had come nearer to identifying the assassin than ever could have been done by policemen. And though I had failed I was no worse off than before.

Ian had gone off to Towcester to buy some beef calves. So before lunch I dropped into the Haunch of Mutton, partly to feel a tranquil human society around me, partly to keep in touch with Ferrin.

“You’d be more comfortable in the saloon,” he said. “You look tired.”

My intelligence was sluggish. I saw no reason why I should be treated as if I were some highly respectable old lady who might not like to take her drink in the public bar. But I obediently followed my beer and the landlord into the so-called saloon — a small room with a table and four prim chairs, vases of artificial flowers on the mantelpiece, and between them a brewer’s calendar displaying a bashful young woman in highly improbable underclothing.

“You’ll be more private in here,” Ferrin insisted. “If I can get hold of him, there’s someone who might want to talk to you. And then again he might not.”

In quarter of an hour he returned with an earthy little man whose walk and manner suggested the farmhand, but whose sharp features and sturdy market-town clothes were more in keeping with a small cattle dealer or auctioneer’s clerk.

“This is Jim Melton. Jim, this is the professor,” said Ferrin, setting down Melton’s stiff whisky alongside my tankard. “You ring the bell if you want anything.”

I offered a cigarette and kept the conversation going on the weather and the state of the hay crop until I felt that the conventions of southern English politeness had been satisfied. Then I ventured to say that Colonel Par-row had been looking for him the day before.

“Comes the colonel over me,” said Jim Melton obscurely.

I suggested that it was just an army habit and didn’t mean anything.

“That’s what I say. Don’t mean a thing! Thursday week, ‘alf past three, Mr. Melton. How’s a busy man like me to know where he’s going to be Thursday week? Now Ferrin here is different. Whenever you’re passing, Jim, he says.”

“The Haunch of Mutton is your business address?” I asked.

“Yes and no. Depends on the business. But I’m always glad to oblige Mr. Ferrin — especially as he tells me the rozzers would like to know all you knows, Perfesser.”

It was plain that Ferrin had all the virtues of a second-in-command. He took his chief’s instructions and drily dolled them up to suit the taste of the recipient.

“Not that I’ve anything against rozzers,” Jim Melton went on. “We pays ‘em, don’t we? That’s what I says to our little fellow last week when he serves me a summons. It’s what I pays yer to do, Jack, I says. But you’re wrong as usual.”

“And was he?”

“He’s no fool, Jack,” replied Jim Melton noncommittally. “But he don’t know his law like I do.”

I rang the bell and had our glasses refilled. Mr. Melton was silent for a while, carefully observing me with sidelong glances which were no more impolite than those of a bird.

“If Ferrin hadn’t told me as you were a perfesser,” he said, “I’d take my oath you was a gamekeeper, every bit of you.”

I chuckled at his acuteness and explained what I really was — neither one nor the other but a bit of both. Then I remembered that Ian or Ferrin had been serving out science fiction to that old soldier, Isaac Purvis.

“Blood count of the smaller mammals is what I am working on,” I said mysteriously. “Fission products in the milk are not clear enough evidence.”

Jim Melton, to my surprise, seemed to know what I was talking about — which was more than I did myself.

“It was them atom bombs which put an end to the rabbits,” he said. “Myxomatosis, they calls it, and what I says is, it comes from all them atom products fallin’ down their floppy ear’oles. I ought to get compensation. Trappin’ was one of my businesses.”

“Well, I suppose you can still find a bit of sport?”

Mr. Melton looked shocked, but surrendered when he saw that I was not.

“I can,” he admitted. “But I only tells you that, mind, to give you confidence. And I don’t hold with them dirty gangs from London what clears out all the pheasants in one night. I’m a reasonable man. One for the pot and one for my expenses.”

I rang the bell for Ferrin again. I have always respected the sporting singlehanded poacher and employed him if he were employable at all. Jim Melton was a useful ally.

“Heard of Fred Gorble?” he asked, when more drinks were on the table.

“No.”

“Fred ain’t too careful what he buys, see? Lives in a caravan on a bit of woodland of his own, with some old farm buildings and no proper road to ‘em. I puts some honest business his way from time to time, which makes a nice change for him.

“Tuesday night I was up there to tell ‘im about a load of old iron what he might have a use for when I sees a ‘orse in the stable what I wasn’t meant to see. Tidy ‘orse, that, I says. Not mine, says he. Whose is it, I asks, for I knows an old girl out Blixworth way what’s looking for a quiet ‘orse up to her weight. You forget about that ‘orse, Jim, he says — you ain’t seen it.

“Well, I thinks, that ‘orse is a ‘unter if ever I see one, but what’s he up to with a ‘unter in the flat season? If it had been winter, I’d have known he was keeping it till the dye wore off. So I thinks, what’s in this for me? Just as you would yourself. And when I says good-by to Fred, I don’t go far but slips round the back of the wood, like. I watches him looking for me, ‘alf-‘earted, but he soon gives up his suspicions.

“Now, this is what I sees, and I wouldn’t think nothing of it if Ferrin hadn’t said you was a friend of his and that you weren’t trustin’ the rozzers to tell you all they knows any more than you want to tell them all you knows.

“Bloke comes along about ‘alf past nine and goes into Fred’s from the back. Changes into boots and breeches and bowler ‘at and then goes off on the ‘orse. Funny time for hackin’, I thinks. And that’s all I knows.”

“When you saw him go into Gorble’s from the back,” I asked, “could he have been coming from the Long Down?”

“Not your end of it, he couldn’t. But the other end he could.”

“How was he dressed before he changed?”

“Couldn’t see in the dusk. But a big bloke, he was, with a cap on his head.”

“Any form of luggage? A knapsack on his back?” I asked, for I couldn’t understand how he had managed to change out of riding kit and into the brown tweed suit at Fred Gorble’s.

“Rolled cape on his saddle when I saw him,” Jim Melton suggested.

That was good enough. All he needed to carry in the roll were shoes, a cap, a pair of trousers to match his jacket, and a collar and tie to take the place of his cravat.

This invaluable agent now insisted on paying for the next round of drinks. Stiff whiskies seemed to have no effect on him whatever. Myself, I was awash with beer; but Ian’s brewery did not seem to be all Ferrin claimed for it. When we had finished, Jim Melton nodded to me, vanished through the kitchen door of the pub, round the back of the yard into the road and along the road to the public bar. It was very evidently his habit to let no one know his business or whereabouts.

As soon as Ian came home I told him the story. He went straight to the telephone to ask whether a rider had passed either of the patrol cars the night before.

“That damned Melton!” he exclaimed while he waited for the reply. “I’ve spent all of a week trying to get hold of him to tell him to keep his eyes open. Bloody little crook! Doesn’t he strike you as the perfect type of double agent?”

He didn’t. Jim had no sense of self-importance. All he wanted from life was to be allowed to scrabble around among the roots of it and avoid notice.

“What did he do in the war?” I asked.

“Caught rats for the Ministry of Agriculture — after fooling the psychiatrists into believing he had fits every time he heard a bang.”

“And the village didn’t give him away?”

“Not they! The joke kept ‘em happy for five years!”

I could see that Jim Melton would be forever beyond Ian’s understanding. He had the quality of an old-fashioned Central European peasant. Any and all rascality was forgivable so long as it made established authority look an ass. The Meltons are the only relic of the feudal system left in England.

The call from the chief constable came through. Yes, one of the patrol cars had passed a well-dressed man on a horse and paid no attention.

“Did they stop?” I asked.

No, they had not stopped — just seen him in the headlights as they cruised by.

The dark gentleman had played his formidable knowledge of customs and country for all it was worth. Hunting with the famous packs of the Whaddon Chase and the Grafton was the winter sport of the district, and horse-breeding a flourishing local industry. Men in cars and on foot might be worth watching, but a well-dressed man on a horse would be assumed to have no interest in vulgar crime. He would not even arouse the curiosity of a town-bred traffic cop, whereas a local farmer would at least wonder where the devil he was hacking to or from at that time of night.