A Rough Shoot (9 page)

“Oh, it’s not that, sir!” the inspector laughed. “Now, we understand from Mr. Blossom that you have rented the shooting over his land. Have you ever noticed anything peculiar up there?”

“I haven’t. But, good Lord, Blossom is there all the time! He could tell you better than I.”

“He sent us to you, Mr. Taine. He was always busy, he said, but you had your eyes open.”

Then, ruling me, I think, off his list of possible suspects, he came clean. He told me that a burned car had been found with the body of an unknown male in it, that the police had had a report of the light of an aircraft being seen on Blossom’s down, and that they had searched the down at first light and seen tracks of landing wheels. Had I ever noticed anything which might Lead Me to Believe … “ 

Well, no, I hadn’t.

“Are you ever up there at night, Mr. Taine?”

“No, of course not,” I answered rather too sharply. 

“Have you ever seen any sign of poachers?” 

I disliked that line of questioning, but what he was after was to get at the names of possible poachers who might have been out at night, and might have noticed something. At last they went away, leaving me gently sweating under my dressing gown. It must be a nuisance for the police that almost every man feels slightly guilty in their presence. If that weren’t so, it would be much easier for them to pick out the truly guilty.

It was convenient, however, to have the police out or the way at so early an hour. I rapped on the trap door with a fishing rod as a signal for Sandorski to lower his rope and come down. He brought with him Lex’s keys. We opened his suitcase.

It was of expensive leather, beautifully fitted inside, and contained everything the painfully well-dressed man would require for the night–silk pyjamas, silk dressing gown, liver salts in a silver-topped bottle, monogrammed hair brushes and a deliberately masculine smell. At the bottom, under a change of tasty socks and underclothing, was a briefcase.

It was a case of thin, imitation black leather, untidily stuffed with papers. The lock, however, was good–not at all the bit of cheap metal which can be bent out with a wrench of the fingers. I didn’t like that case; it seemed to me incongruous. I don’t claim any instinct, or any particular powers of observation; but I do believe that you can’t live through five years of very active service without developing a strong sense of self-preservation. The night’s work had put me back in the old mood of treating unknown objects, whether a pin-up picture, a water-closet plug or a bottle of wine, with extreme care. I don’t know how many times I have lectured troops on not whooping with joy every time they came across attractive little surprises.

Sandorski chose a key, but it didn’t fit. He was turning the key ring for another, when I picked up the briefcase and felt it.

“Do you really think this was what they hired a plane for?” I asked.

“Eh? Of course!”

He stretched out his hand for the case, but I didn’t offer it.

“Why couldn’t they have needed a plane just for Lex?”

“For Lex? They could get him in with a lot less trouble. Documents–these and whatever comes after and the replies–that’s what they need an air service for.”

I wanted to be assured that the beastly case was really important. I was not at all eager to prove what I suspected unless it had to be done.

“All right,” I said. “But this time it’s going to be infantry tactics.”

I went into the bathroom (taking the case with me, for I wasn’t going to trust the impetuous Sandorski alone with it) and came back with a new razor blade. I held the top of the case firmly, and cut the seam which fastened the expanding pleats at the bottom to the stiffer side. The case was filled with loose paper, which I pulled out and Sandorski preserved.

Meanwhile I could feel under my left hand a hard cylinder, apparently attached to the side of the case. That confirmed my suspicion that there was a device of some sort connected to the lock–almost certainly a simple incendiary. I would have liked to take the whole thing out into the garden, but appearance in the garden was taboo. And anyway the thing hypnotized me into avoiding all movement. So I started to worry about the new bedroom carpet, which was a convenient and handy object for worry.

When I had cleared the paper, I looked inside. The cylinder was an ordinary cardboard roll–the sort that one uses as a container for maps or blueprints. It was tied over the open ends with tape and sealed with a lead seal. Fingers rather than eyes found a wire running through the tape into the center of the cylinder and attached to the latch of the case. It looked as if slipping the catch or removing the roll would pull the wire.

I tried to remember, among all the debris of long forgotten courses on everything from control of flies to detection of wooden mines (the answer in both cases being that you couldn’t), what I had learned about all the dirty tricks of sappers. There was something about a spring which released a plunger which broke a vessel of sulphuric acid which did pretty well anything you wanted it to do.

Well, if the pulling of the catch pulled the wire–as it obviously did–and released the plunger, there must be some way by which Lex could prevent it happening. I wished I had done a course on bomb disposal. I wished I had been in the garden. I wished above all that I had the power to take my left hand off the top of the case and that I wouldn’t press so hard. I wished that we hadn’t bought a new bedroom carpet.

I poked about inside the other end of the cylinder and, sure enough, I found a metal slide with a small knob on the end lying along the cardboard. Lex could have got at this knob from the outside of the case by thrusting a finger into the cheap, pliable material and feeling for it. He couldn’t possibly have pulled it; so I put an overcoat over my face, in case I was wrong, and pressed it. It slid home with a comforting click.

There were probably no other risks, but I wasn’t going to find out. I cut the stitches that held the cardboard roll to the side of the case, cut the tape, and slipped off the roll. Inside was a metal cylinder, rather larger than a fat fountain pen, still attached by its plunger wire to the interior of the latch. So far as I was concerned, it could stay attached.

I gave Sandorski full marks as a commanding officer. He had made none of his staccato and intelligent suggestions, and had remained perfectly quiet, confident and close to me through the whole business.

We withdrew the papers from their container, and unrolled them. They were important enough to justify the extreme precautions that senders and recipients had taken, and for Sandorski they completed the picture. I forget the exact words he used, but his explanation left me with an image of a cone made, let us say, of separate wires, within which he stood. He knew already the circular base of the cone and varying lengths of the upward course of the wires. What these documents gave him was the apex where they all met. We had:

1. List of cover names.

This was without heading or remark, and was a fairly harmless document if kept apart from the others. It gave us the national leaders who were in correspondence with each other. I can’t say they were very impressive, but they had this in common, according to Sandorski: that they were sincere.

2. Files of leading fascists who were still at large in Italy, Germany and the free countries of Europe, with notes on their reliability.

3. Propaganda directive for Heyne-Hassingham, with unintelligible code references which looked like dates for action.

4. A letter to Hiart asking for a report on the family connections, political sympathies and past of certain financiers in Sweden and America who had offered money.

5. Draft of an agreement for either signature or initialing by Heyne-Hassingham.

There it was, all the old stuff of the logo’s in a brand-new dress! A revolution of the little man to answer the revolution of the littler man. There were to be simultaneous coups d’etat in the states of western Europe, and the immediate promise of peace and unity; and until that millennium arrived, all the weapons of communism were to be used to defeat communism. For me and my like it merely meant that the flag over our concentration camp would be white instead of red.

The strength of the movement was in Hiart and his opposite numbers abroad. Since these officials were the most trusted servants of state, the damage they could do by collaborating with each other behind the backs of their governments was incalulable. None of the political chiefs expected anything spectacular of Heyne-Hassingham; but, even so, they had fallen into Ribbentrop’s mistake. They thought that his precious People’s Union could make such a nuisance of itself that British policy would be forced to be neutral.

“That’s the end of Heyne-Hassingham,” I said. “Now we go straight to the police.”

“Do we? Colonel, my lad, the value of all this just depends on my reliability and yours.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Don’t you–ha? Your security people get this sort of thing once a week. Wild political accusations. Just what you’d expect from a bunch of unemployed Polish officers who wanted money. I might have forged all this–easily.”

Up to then I had followed his lead blindly, for I was in such a mess that there was nothing else I could do; but now my responsibility, my duty, had become equal to his.

“No complications,” I said. “I insist on immediate action.”

He went all general, and treated me as if I had been some Polish officer who dared to question his patriotism. I didn’t mind. I knew he was loosing off the accumulated strain of the last hour. He told me–if it can be called telling–that because he was anti-communist, it didn’t mean he was a pro-fascist traitor.

“Patience, not politics!” he shouted at me. “Do you understand? Patience is what we need.”

“We do,” I said drily.

He barked at me, and fumed and fretted for a moment, trying, for the sake of his pride, to work up his temper again. It couldn’t be done. He apologized with a most wholehearted grace. His words were so gallant that they might have been addressed to a woman. The art of the apology has been lost in countries where the duel is out of fashion.

“I’ll get off to London tonight,” he said, “and take Lex with me.”

“Will he go?”

“Go? Why not? Doesn’t know where he is. Doesn’t know who I am. What can he do? Shove his head out of the window and howl for Heyne-Hassingham? Lex will come like a lamb so long as we don’t frighten him. Look the blighter up!”

We found Lex on the list of cover names. Sandorski knew of him, but they had never met. He was a Czech of Austrian descent, and had been, in better days, a prominent lawyer with a taste for wildcat politics. We also found Pink’s true name. He was the tough and eccentric son of an obscure English peer, and he had been fired out of the Navy for gross insubordination. Evidently he had been under the impression that he was Nelson.

Peter Sandorski boldly made his arrangements by telephone. There was no reason to suppose we were under any suspicion, and indeed at that time–which was about midday–we were not. He called a Whitehall number, and spoke to a friend named Roland, asking him to make arrangements for two air passages to Vienna and for a safe-he stressed safe–lodging meanwhile. It was clear that he had the connections to travel freely, even semiofficially. How far the secret services of Western powers supplied him with funds, I do not know; but his organization of Poles and expatriates, playing for European peace and stability, must have been extremely useful.

When Cecily came back from her shopping and her children, she gave us a picnic lunch in the roof, and herself kept watch below. Lex returned to consciousness and gave little trouble. I think it was Cecily who put confidence into him. He couldn’t believe that such a woman would feed him and fuss over him if anything were intended against his life or liberty. As an experienced lawyer he must have been a fair judge of human nature. What he made of us then, I don’t know. He probably trusted us provisionally, failing anyone else to trust. We told him that his suitcase was in a safe place, and lent him a razor. We also gave him a good story to the effect that we had had to drug him, so that if he were caught he wouldn’t be able to talk until Heyne-Hassingham had an opportunity to tell him what to say.

Our plan was simple, and I imagine it would have worked. I was going to sneak Sandorski and Lex into the garage after dark–which could be done provided my house was not watched at very close range–make them lie in the bottom of the car till we were clear of the immediate neighborhood, and then drive them to a bus stop. I couldn’t drive them far, in case there was a police cordon round the district; if we were stopped and questioned, Lex, who spoke with a strong foreign accent and had no identity documents, would put the lot of us under suspicion. On a country bus, however, and then a train to London, it was certain they would pass through as any other citizens.

The children came back from school, and Cecily arranged to walk up to the village with them on an ice-cream expedition in order to get them out of the way while Sandorski and Lex descended from the roof. It was growing dark and she was just about to start, when we had another call from the inspector of police.

“We have been checking the footprints on Mr. Blossom’s land, sir,” he said after some polite preliminaries, “and we would like to get clear the people who had every right to be there. Would you mind showing me your shooting boots?”

Fortunately I had cleaned them. He took the measurements and a note of missing studs on the sole. He looked puzzled, but preserved a beautiful mask of official cordiality.

“When were you last at the northern end of the down?”

“Let me see,” I said. “Where exactly do you mean?”

“A little east of the curve of the valley. There’s a big holly bush halfway down, if you remember.”

“I know. I was there last Saturday.”

“Not later?”

“No, inspector.”

He was on to something, but I wasn’t worried. I felt quite certain that the short, springy turf wouldn’t reveal a measurable footprint, and certainly not the time when it was made.

“Mr. Taine,” he said. “Suppose I were to tell you that I had good reason to believe you were on the down sometime yesterday or last night?”