Authors: Geoffrey Household
‘So that is why you were so anxious that I should go back to the hide. How were you going to tell them that you found out where I was?’ Alwyn asked.
‘The truth—that you wanted me to help you to escape abroad.’
‘But that is evidence that if I was involved in the escape of Mornix, so were you.’
‘I couldn’t help that.’
‘Leave her to me, Alwyn!’ Eudora hissed—it was the sort of hiss you might expect from a dinosaur. ‘She was going to tell the police that she found it out from
Tessa.’
‘No!’
Eudora slung her across the bed and set Sack down on it.
‘Yes, Tessa! Silly little Tessa!’ Rachel screamed.
‘Well, we don’t need to hear any more, Sack,’ Eudora remarked. ‘What will the police do when they get her letter, Alwyn?’
‘Collect Rachel from her flat. Not there. Vanished without trace unless they have the luck to find someone who saw her picked up on the street. Strong suspicion that the KGB have pulled a
fast one. They will have already cordoned my wood at a distance. At first light they may go straight in or they may wait for the van to arrive. When they find evidence that I was there very
recently and have cleared out just in time, probably a helicopter, road blocks and dogs. Then enquiries here. Stick to your story that I am in Russia. You have the letter to show with my
address.’
Eudora at once insisted that he and Rachel must go to earth in the ‘old place’ until the hunt was called off.
‘And you, Willie, bolt for it now!’
I had to think that out quickly. If Alwyn were caught, he still could not prove his innocence. He could say how the Whatcombe Street escape was done and that Rachel was the agent who did it. But
that did not help. There was a strong presumption that the pair had collaborated and that each was now trying to throw the blame on the other.
Ciampra—it seemed very probable that he would be brought into the case with his story of the mysterious Willie and the letter dropped at the Russian Embassy. No difficulty in establishing
that a person known as Willie and pretending to be a Portuguese had visited Cleder’s Priory. Rachel, if discovered and interrogated, could identify Willie as Ionel Petrescu, and a cheerful
interview he would have with MI5 after that.
‘How safe is your old hide-out?’ I asked Alwyn.
‘It has never been searched or even noticed. Your two Marghiloman agents looked right at it.’
Marghiloman. I had almost forgotten him. That was another complication, whether he was KGB or MI5. I didn’t care for my chances at all. Probably I exaggerated the strength of that police
cordon—now in position for it was 2 a.m.—but it seemed to me that if I bolted as Eudora wanted me to and if I were caught and held for further enquiries, my scent or my footprints could
show that I had visited Alwyn in the birthday hut. Mr. Petrescu, whether Adrian Gurney or not, would go inside for conspiracy, let alone any other unanticipated charges.
‘I think I’d better come with you,’ I said.
Alwyn agreed. He apologised for it afterwards, saying that he doubted if he was right but that he would almost rather give himself up than be confined alone with Rachel. There was also the
question of keeping an eye on her. He had to sleep some time.
We left immediately by the bracken path with Rachel between us. Eudora picked us up at the ford and again we folded Rachel in the boot while Alwyn and I lay under a rug on the floor of the car.
It was a nerve-racking drive, for if police were watching the lanes south of Molesworthy they had us cold; but the only alternative was to walk twelve miles at top speed—impossible for a limp
Rachel. We were not stopped, and Eudora parked off the track down from Cousin’s Cross fairly close to the spot where she had picked us up five hours earlier.
There were no sounds from the mudbank and no lights where the cruiser had been. Alwyn reckoned that she must have crept as close to the shoal as she could get, sounding all the way, and then
thrown a rope or perhaps launched a life raft. At any rate she had pulled off her dinghy and her man and would now be well out to sea. There was little chance that her movements could have been
singled out among the clumsy comings and goings of holiday yachtsmen.
The tide was now rising, but the water was much lower than before, looking like a stagnant pond at the bottom of the deep, still valley. On the opposite shore the half-derelict converted
lifeboat was lying over on the mud. I could just make out the dark shape against all the other darknesses.
‘That’s it,’ Alwyn said. ‘We have to wait another hour before I can get at her.’
Earlier in the evening light she had appeared quite uninhabitable in spite of the old canvas cover. Nobody but a very patient fugitive could have stayed in her without fire or lamp, only moving
out on the darkest nights to meet Eudora and John and take in supplies. I couldn’t imagine how three of us were going to live in her undetected.
‘Can you swim, Rachel?’
‘No.’
‘You must have been bored in the Aegean with your minister. He’s like a fish in the water.’
‘I watched him,’ she answered sullenly.
Eudora and Alwyn returned to the car and came back to the foreshore carrying a child’s inflatable canoe, a case of tinned food and a demijohn of water.
‘That will have to do us for a couple of days. Then Eudora will drop more supplies if it’s safe.’
‘Who does the boat belong to?’
‘Nobody knows exactly. She drowned her owner and was found and towed in. He used to come down from London. Somebody—his heir we supposed—had the cover fitted to her many years
ago and just left her on the moorings. I had a look over her once to see if she was worth repairing. She was, but I couldn’t track down the owner. She’s a melancholy fixture now. Nobody
notices her any longer.’
When she was afloat, Alwyn stripped and swam off to her, returning in a few minutes. He loaded the canoe with food and water, put his clothes on top and told us to do the same. Rachel began to
yap protests. When the volume increased, Eudora slammed a hand over her mouth.
‘You are going with them now. You can do what you like when they are safe.’
‘I want to go in the canoe.’
‘It’s full.’
‘I can’t swim. Really.’
‘Then I will tow you,’ said Alwyn. ‘One yell and you go under!’
When she was down to bra and panties he made her slide into the water and swam on his back with his hands under her shoulders. She made no fuss, probably glad that she was in his hands not the
questionable Ionel Petrescu’s. I followed pushing the canoe which trailed a line behind it, the other end of which was in Eudora’s hand. Wind rustled the leaves of the trees on both
banks with a continuous hiss, but there was none on the black water which rose without sound or ripple. When I was half way across a pair of widgeon got up with squawk and clatter. That was the
only disturbance of the solitude.
As I came up to the derelict I saw that the canvas cover had been loosened a little aft of the counter. Alwyn’s head was sticking out above a hanging rope with loops in it for feet and
hands. I passed clothes and supplies up to him.
‘Give a couple of sharp tugs on the line and Eudora will pull the canoe back,’ he whispered.
All was pitch dark inside. We sat on the cockpit grating since the canvas cover came down too low to use the seats. Rachel was in the cabin, an old fur coat keeping her warm in the cold, damp
air. He had told her that if she yelled or started hammering on the sides I should be ordered to deal with her. A good touch, that was. She had known Alwyn long enough to be pretty sure he was
incapable of brutality, but I might well be an experienced thug.
At dawn a dull light came through the canvas and I could see where I was. Forward of the cockpit the deck was flush except for the low curve of the cabin roof. Under the canvas, supported by a
spar running fore and aft, there was just room to crawl past the roof up to the bows.
Alwyn had cut some small, irregular slits in the canvas which gave a complete view of the creek. If all was silent the gulls settled on the derelict. The white streaks of their droppings and the
sides green with weed prohibited any thought that the interior of the boat could be habitable. As Alwyn said, she was a part of the landscape, a fixture which belonged to the mud.
‘What about sanitary arrangements?’
‘Difficult. Buckets. She’s got one in there. The only solution is to empty over the side on the ebb.’
It was the devil to keep quiet such a highly strung character as Rachel. She was always making little nervous movements and noises and frightening off the gulls. Fortunately there were enough
small craft about at the top of the tide to account for our best camouflage taking flight.
Alwyn spent some time in the cabin with her, leaving half open the mouldering mahogany doors. Instead of dressing, she remained in the comfort of the fur coat very casually fastened if at all,
determined to arouse our interest. I don’t think she meant to oblige us both in quick succession. Possibly she hoped to arouse jealousy and a desert island sort of row. If I had been alone
with her I should have had to keep myself firmly under control. I could now at last understand that unfortunate Minister of the Crown who had merely wanted to be briefed on the ideals and policies
of the commune downstairs and had found an irresistible itch for the more fascinating occupation upstairs.
She was eager to talk about and excuse herself, managing to skate over the treachery to Alwyn while demanding pity. It was not the usual blackmail by which the KGB had caught her, nothing to do
with compromising photographs or perversities in some establishment too swell and silver-plated to be vulgarly called a whorehouse. In Rachel’s highly intellectual and fairly permissive
society she would have to have the depravity of a Messalina for any of that to tempt her. Political perversities had been her downfall. Having toyed with communism, rejected Trotskyism and decided
that Europe had not enough patriotic peasants to put up with Mao’s boy-scoutism, she had reached a blind alley of hopelessness in which she had decided that before society could be remade it
must suffer—not exactly revolution, but a complete breakdown of law and order. I put this Pilgrim’s Progress of hers with a crudity which would have earned her utter contempt. It was in
fact complex, genuine and far too erudite for me.
She never realised any more than the other savage innocents that her group was a sitting duck for infiltration by the KGB. They got hold of papers and letters in which she had considered targets
for the single-handed bomber which would cause maximum disruption at a small cost in lives. Two of her proposals had actually been carried out.
The KGB had used no coarse threats. Their agent remained courteously respectful of her beliefs, merely suggesting what she might do to help the International Left, whether strictly communist or
not, whom she should meet and what political information it would be useful to have. It was not until the Mornix escape that she was left in no doubt at all who was secretly employing her and that
she must obey or be exposed.
She insisted that when she reported Alwyn’s cry for help to her contact she was sure they would get him out of the country.
‘Why should they?’ he asked.
‘Well, you were a nuisance. It would be far better for them if you were safely out of England.’
‘Leaving me free to say they helped me, and how?’
‘But they want to avoid all the embarrassment of your arrest and trial.’
‘They also want to use my supposed flight to Moscow as propaganda. But if they are to do that, I have to be dead.’
‘It never occurred to me, Alwyn,’ she said.
‘No? Yet you have a reputation for clear thinking.’
The day passed in utter boredom, one of us often asleep while the other kept watch on Rachel. In the early evening at slack water a rowing boat came round the corner from South Pool. As it
approached we saw that it was John Penpole at the oars with one of his terriers sitting up on the prow like a little figurehead. He drifted alongside and stood up to throw a stick as far as he
could, steadying himself with one hand on the derelict. The terrier plunged in. John let go and pulled clear of us with the dog following. It was beautifully done. Nobody could have guessed that
the steadying hand had inserted a note under the canvas.
‘We have had polite hell from your former office,’ Eudora wrote. ‘Police dogs everywhere. John and I exercised the hounds early this morning, passing wherever you had walked
including garden, house and kennel room plus half the pack in the bathroom. So they had no luck. One Alsatian bitten on the nose by Sack. They know you left the wood in a small van, and nothing
more. Search is concentrated away to the east. So far as I know, Rachel’s disappearance still not reported.’
Alwyn whispered this out to both of us with the exception of the last sentence. Without any change of voice he substituted:
‘They have been asking what we know of Rachel and I think have connected her with the van or with her earlier visit to you.’
He then continued with the last lines of the note before putting a match to it:
‘In case my movements are watched I am staying at home, properly indignant. Nobody is interested in Willie. Send him ashore at bottom of tide.’
Rachel was very quiet. Three years in Holloway was what she foresaw, police informant or not. I was quiet too. Having seen what happened to the yacht hand when he stepped out of his dinghy I
felt that Eudora had overlooked the mud. Nobody could go ashore or visit us while the boat lay over on God knows what depth of black slime.
When the sun had set and we could hear the ebb gurgling under the bows, Alwyn bolted Rachel in the cabin along with her fears and whatever conscience she had. She was now very amenable. Having
realised that she was helpless, she played her dependence on him for all it was worth.
‘She wouldn’t understand, but it’s better if she doesn’t see what we do,’ he explained.
I pointed out that I didn’t understand either.
‘You will. When you first met me, did I look as if I had swum ashore?’