Watcher in the Shadows (11 page)

I did not tell him that I needed him as a witness in case I had to fire in self-defense. I knew he distrusted the box as much as the dock.

Jim switched on the light and I walked through his stores with my hand in my pocket. There was indeed a broken flowerpot on the floor, and a tarpaulin had fallen — if that wasn’t its usual place — on the top of two upright rolls of wire. Behind them was possible cover for a man, provided nobody looked for him.

“This will do the job,” I said, extracting a piece of two-by-four from a pile of loose timber.

We shut the shed and went out. And yet I felt my enemy. That is difficult to analyze. I suppose that only years of living on one’s nerves can teach the difference between imagination which is out of control and the quite dependable instinct of the hunted.

The instinct at any rate was strong enough for me to search about for some logical reason which could justify it. I asked what the stables at Woburn were like.

Jim described a Victorian farmhouse with its back facing a yard round which, on the other three sides, were stables and cowsheds with a second story of lofts over them.

“When you were leading them on to tell you about fforde-Crankshaw, where actually were you?”

“Bang under the gable with the clock in it.”

“What’s up there?”

“Nothing except rats, I’d say.”

It was a far-fetched theory; but what about that vanishing while the horse was being unsaddled? If Mr. fforde-Crankshaw were wanted by name or description, the last place the police would look for him would be the livery stables. And if he had decided to he up there for a day he could probably see and possibly overhear all visitors to the yard.

“When you were talking to the chaps there, did you give your address?”

“They knows it,” Jim replied. “Ah, but didn’t I? Bought a nice load of manure, you see. Mushroom farmers, they’ll pay anything for well-rotted stuff. Yes, they had a new man, and I told him the nearest way.”

It was working out. Mr. fforde-Crankshaw, scenting danger but partially convinced he was imagining it, must have been very tempted to check up. There had been no police inquiries, but who was Jim? What was behind his interest?

There was one grave objection to this picture of my opponent’s board. He must have calculated on leaving the stable lofts after dark. Yet he had left in broad daylight. Was that possible without being seen and inviting questions?

“What’s behind the gable with the clock in it?”

“Company director’s place it was once,” Jim said, “before he went bust and ‘ad to run for it with all the money he’d lost farming. Other side of the stables is all his fancy trees and rhododendrons.”

That too fitted. It was now worthwhile to test the only available fact which could prove my hypothesis — or, if not worthwhile, it had to be done. I told Jim to stay where he was, and I would find his missing spade for him. I would have liked to have him alongside me, but it was not a fair risk for the father of a family —even though I was pretty sure the tiger would not have returned to the sandpit from which he could no longer see anything at all.

I crawled up the slope behind the shed and put my head cautiously over the edge of the depression. The working floor of sand, some eight or nine feet beneath me, was bare and the light still good enough to distinguish any object on the flat surface. The spade was there all right.

To see anything else I should have had to go down with a torch. That was asking for trouble, since I could not know what was on the opposite side of the excavation; so I contented myself with taking a close look at the wet, packed sand within a few feet of my nose. I found fresh footmarks — of a rather pointed shoe which certainly did not belong to any of the Melton family. For the weight of the tiger it was a small foot. The tracks pointed straight downhill for the shed until they were wiped out by the furrows of my knees and forearms.

It was all very interesting, but of no immediate use. Tiger impulsively but sensibly reconnoiters Jim’s cottage from above. Finds convenient sandpit for observation post. Hunch pays off, for he hasn’t been there long before he sees me arrive. Is tempted by spade which he can approach without being seen. A bad mistake, though doubtless it would help if my body wasn’t found for a week. Shelters from rain in shed. Could easily have explained that was just what he was doing and got away with it. But his reconstruction of my unseen board is alarming. And Jim is still an enigma. So when he is nearly caught he first hides and then clears out.

“Your spade is in the sandpit,” I told Jim. “Get it in the morning.”

“Not now?”

“Not now.”

“When you went into the shed, I noticed you kept your ‘and in your pocket,” he said. “Now it’s none of my business what you got in it. And what Ferrin tells me is all lies. And me and the colonel, we don’t get on. But if you feel lonely up at the Warren, you’ve only got to say.”

I assured him that I was only going to stay there that night, and it was unlikely I should be disturbed.

“And what do you want the missus to tell Fred?” he asked.

“That nobody has made any inquiries about the rider, and that I left the Warren in a hurry.”

I gratefully accepted his offer to drive me home, and said good-by to Mrs. Melton and the children. The front seat of the hearse was luxurious. It was a remarkable vehicle. The panels all round the body, where plate glass had been, were filled in by neatly overlapping planks attached by angle brackets to the black and gold pillars, and varnished black to match. The roof was of stout canvas on bentwood ribs. It made a discreet and efficient van for shifting livestock or any of Jim’s less reputable bargains.

“Got it dirt cheap,” he said. “There ain’t no market for used ‘earses. And the bloke threw in some nice elm boards for the conversion.”

I avoided offering a silhouette against the naked electric bulbs on the cottage porch and the shed, and kept well down in my seat until we were out on the road. Yet somehow I knew that it was utterly impossible for the tiger to be about, though my mind, very tired by now, could not see on what I based this certainty.

As we drove towards Hernsholt I ran over the probabilities again and at last got at what was bothering me. If the shelterer from the rain had dived for the cover of those two rolls of wire on Jim’s sudden arrival, how had he ever got out of the shed? He had no chance of escaping under the eyes of both Mr. and Mrs. Melton and Jim had locked the door behind him. So there was something as wrong and incredible as a conjuring trick.

And then I saw it. By all that unriddling of the unintelligible I had been distracted from what was perfectly plain and obvious. I slid instantly off the front seat and fitted as much of my body as I could into the floor of the cab, putting a finger on my lips as a sign to Jim to notice nothing.

“Drive for the nearest lights and police station,” I whispered. “Don’t stop on any account! If anything happens to me, keep going!”

He looked at me in astonishment. I jerked my thumb at the shiny black boards behind the driving seat. He thought for a second and saw what I meant. There was only one place where fforde-Crankshaw could be. When he heard us coming back to the shed and unlocking the door, he had quietly taken refuge in the van. And he was still in it —with nothing but a wooden panel between me and his gun.

There was no means of covering all of myself. If he fired a burst through the partition at the level of heart and lungs he would miss; but if he aimed below where my waist ought to be he would almost certainly score on my head or shoulders. I never felt so coldly exposed. As for slowing down or stopping — that, I thought, would give him just the chance he was waiting for in order to let me have it, jump out and vanish. He was hardly likely to take action while Jim continued to bucket over country roads at a steady forty-five. The only comfort was that if he missed me I could be out of the front seat as quickly as he could drop from the double door at the back, and at last shoot to kill without fear of the law.

It was the devil of an indecisive position. Jim had turned east, and in another two or three minutes we were going to hit the A 5 road. He might be able to swing straight into the traffic stream without stopping, but we could not count on it. At that time of night there was usually a procession of lorries passing between London and the west Midlands.

It was the hearse’s horn which got us through. It had a deeply respectful note — funereal but commanding enough to make all long-distance lorry drivers jam on their brakes and curse the amateur. Jim halted for a second at the junction. He could not turn right to Bletchley, as we had intended, but he could —just — turn left for Stony Stratford, forcing a truck into the middle of the road and leaving a line of angrily winking headlights behind us. We may very well have given the impression of criminals escaping with the week’s wage packets.

“Only one lot of traffic lights now,” Jim whispered. “I’ll jump ‘em if you say so. But if you’re going to ‘and ‘im over to the police, what’s your ‘urry?”

I explained that I dared not give him a safe chance to jump out.

“How thick are those boards?” I asked.

“Thick enough to keep him in.”

“He’s only got to open the doors at the back.”

“‘E can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because there ain’t no ‘andle on the inside. Passengers don’t need it, like. Not if the coffin’s nailed down proper.”

I remember bursting into a bark of laughter, which I suppose was partly hysterical. So the tiger was as helplessly caught as if he had been a real tiger! It wouldn’t do him any good to kill. Nothing would do him any good. He was on his way to the cage or the taxidermist in a plain, black-varnished box-trap.

The line of lights on the main street of Stony Stratford was just ahead when a police car passed us, pulled across in front and signaled to Jim to stop.

Two of the cops closed in on us, one at my door and one at Jim’s. They were very evidently prepared to tell us that whatever we said was, was not. What has made British police adopt their new fashion of weary brutality? Forced on them by criminals or borrowed from alien films? At any rate I did not trust them to take my story seriously. I wanted an inspector at a desk.

At first they accused Jim of not stopping at a halt sign. When he insisted that he did stop, they dropped the effort to make him confess he didn’t and merely warned him not to take chances. It was pretty clear that the lorry driver who reported us had been a sport and had contented himself with abusing our road sense and our suspicious-looking vehicle.

While one of them examined Jim’s papers, the other ordered me to get out and open up the van.

“Open it yourself I” I said. “And stand behind the door while you do it!”

The van was empty. A flap of the canvas roof hung down, neatly cut out with a knife. The tiger had escaped without even the necessity for any acrobatics. Notches and joints on the corner posts, to which the ornate canopy had once been attached, provided easy footholds.

Either at the junction with the main road or now while the police were lecturing us he had climbed up, quietly and decisively chosen his moment and slid to the ground at the back of the van.

I looked up the road. There on the other side of it was his unmistakable figure walking fast but casually past the first of the street lamps. He waved to a bus turning out of a corner ahead. Naturally it did not wait, but that gave him an excuse to hurry. I pointed at him and may have even opened my mouth to shout “Stop him!” But my arm dropped. What was the use? How in an instant could I persuade those pompous young cops that it was I, not he, who was a law-abiding citizen?

And what charge could I bring? I had not the slightest proof that he had ever been in the van. Jim had never seen his face. I — well, all I could swear after these days and nights of anxiety at the Warren, at the badger fortress and on the road was that I had once observed him out on a quiet country walk. No, for my own safety it was wiser at this point not to reveal that I suspected him. When we met again he could no longer take me by surprise, for I had seen his face and he still did not know it.

I put no limit at all to his daring, but I could safely put a limit to his endurance since he was my own age. So when Jim at last left me at the Warren, I locked the door, relaxed and cheerfully damned the consequences. I had not been in the cottage for nearly thirty-six hours. The letter from Admiral Cunobel, to which Aunt Georgina had referred, was there waiting for me; it was a warm and genial invitation to come over and stay whenever I liked and for as long as I could.

I felt free to do so, at any rate for a week. I was determined not to involve Georgina and a stranger — even if lie had rocked my cradle — in my affairs, but it seemed improbable that my follower could soon begin again to pad along my trail. I had to be found. His careful reconnaissance had to be made.

Next morning I telephoned to the admiral and embarked on one of those very English cross-country journeys which delight me. There is no silence which sings so noticeably in the ears as that of a remote railway junction in the middle of meadows with no village in sight when the noise of the departing train has died away.

Admiral Cunobel had chosen for his retirement a graystone Jacobean farmhouse on the southern tip of the Cotswolds, where he seemed entirely contented with village affairs and his garden. Chipping Marton struck me as a livelier spot than Hernsholt. It was linked with the world, whereas the Midland village, though not far from London, was lost in its pastures. Its first inhabitants had not merely collected together into a Saxon lump; they had built their solid, stone houses in full consciousness of geography. Go downhill on one side and you came to the Severn Estuary. Go downhill on the other and you hit the road from London to Bristol.

The admiral ran the place. He considered it his duty. Chipping Marton, on the other hand, had no use whatever for naval discipline, though it respected energy. Cunobel and his village seemed to live in a state of mutual and exasperated affection.