Watcher in the Shadows (16 page)

“What? That one?” the admiral asked, surprised. “I got it off a submarine commander in the first war. Don’t suppose it’s ever been used!”

“But have you any ammo? Ill want at least twenty rounds before I can be sure how she throws.”

“Well, they can’t trace the number,” he grumbled with some satisfaction, “if —er —well, if it was found lying about. I think I might risk it. It would be useful on rabbits, eh? I can’t afford a good .22 rifle with my pension, eh? I’ll go up to London tomorrow and get you a couple of boxes from old friends at the Admiralty. When will you start?”

“Pamellor’s letter should be in Paris tomorrow. I don’t think our friend will be content with the usual speed of French official communications. He will know the answer—probably verbally —in three or four days more. His next move is to close in boldly. You may find him calling on you to propose a prize for the best French essay in the grammar school.”

“Damn his impudence!” the admiral exclaimed. “But he doesn’t need to. We know the fellow is well up in the horsy world. He can find out that Mr. Dennim is exercising the Arab stallion without coming nearer than a Bath hotel. He’ll be after you at once.”

I did not think so. It would take him time to choose and prepare a base, though he must have one or two possibles lined up already.

“I hope he chooses Gorble again,” I said, “because then I’ve got him. I reckon that if I start at the beginning of next week I should be in close contact by the end of it.”

The Arab stallion and his rider showed themselves again and again on the bare skyline above the plain of the Severn. The villages where I bought forage and supplies could give news of us, and the farmers from whom I asked permission to camp. Yet all was peace and sun and waving grass. Fear dwindled to a reasonable caution and could not nag me with an image of those dedicated feet pacing behind. No other horseman was glimpsed for an instant across the long ridges of the Cotswolds.

This was Benita’s England: the line of uplands which formed a pathway from the Atlantic beaches into the heart of the land. Its naked gentleness saddened me, for beauty which is foreign to the spirit and unattainable creates a loneliness. With the Saxons, creeping up their muddy estuaries into the forest, I had easy sympathy. My heredity was theirs; what they thought a site for a settlement would also be my choice. But here was a glory of my adopted land which did not belong to me. My roots searched over the surface of the rock, unable for the moment to penetrate more deeply.

It was perfect country, however, for my purpose, which was to call up the tiger onto ground of my own choosing. I did not expect him in full daylight. An attack would be most difficult to carry through with the clean certainty of success which he preferred. But dusk and a lonely man should tempt him.

Georgina had supplied me with a list of inns and farms where a horse would be welcome for the night. I did not use them. My evening routine was to camp early in woodland by one of the hidden Cotswold streams and then, having picketed Nur Jehan, to watch the approaches from a tree or high ground. If I saw any doubtful traveler, I stalked and investigated him. When I knew that my position had not been reconnoitered before nightfall I could sleep in peace.

Apart from my careful selection of camp sites too secluded to be easily approached in darkness, I did nothing unexpected. My intentions would be plain to any interested person pricking out my northeasterly route upon the inch ordnance map. I was keeping off the metaled roads so far as possible and obviously aiming for the short turf and empty fields around the sources of Churn and Windrush. After that I might turn back to Chipping Marton or go on — as I intended — through Banbury and Brackley to the Long Down and the patch of Midland country already familiar to the tiger.

I sent a postcard every day to comfort Matthew Gil-Ion, who was still uneasy at the thought that Nur Jehan was being treated as a real horse. The stallion was amenable to any plan. He considered me, I think, a fellow male and playmate —a better one than the vicar’s pigs which could never get out of their sty or the village children who ran away or women whose proper place was in the kitchen tent. If I also wished to sit on his back, that was a matter which could easily be arranged to the satisfaction of two gentlemen. Obedience, he had none; good will, plenty. He was accustomed to single rein and unjointed snaffle, and neither his former owner nor the vicar had ever ridden him up to that.

Too many memories of youth crowded in for my safety. Half of me joyously dropped twenty years and concentrated on schooling this sensitive and lovely aristocrat, who was anxious as a boy on a football field to do the right thing if only someone would explain the game. The other half — the old goat which had no use for memories but wanted to live — found Nur Jehan an embarrassment. It was difficult to give enough attention to my own security while trying to make chocolate and cream playfulness understand the language of the legs.

He had to carry a light sleeping bag and ground sheet as well as his own blanket, and until he was in condition I seldom gave him my own weight as well. We mostly marched in the morning and devoted an hour in the afternoon to education. As a packhorse he was reliable. He followed to heel like a well-trained dog, occasionally amusing himself by butting me from behind when I least expected it.

On my way I answered questions freely, saying that I was going through Banbury to Hernsholt where I had a cottage and would stay a few nights. So it was simple to pick up my trail. I was covering only some twenty miles a day; anyone could keep close contact with me by taking an innocent evening’s run in a car and stopping for a drink in villages which I had passed. I reckoned that if the dark rider was again going to make use of Fred Gorble he should already have made his arrangements and left his pugmark in the neighborhood.

On the sixth night I camped between Brackley and Buckingham, and next day rode across country to call on Jim Melton, making a wide circuit round Hernsholt, for I did not wish Ian Parrow to hear of my presence. My respectful affection for him was unchanged, and arguments were to be avoided. I no longer felt the false affinity to Jim as one outcast to another —my lonely sense of being eternally dirtied was much less after the warmth of Chipping Marton and the revelation that Georgina had always known my secret —but as a discreet ally, Jim was a man after my own heart.

Mrs. Melton was at home. So were her two daughters, who ought to have been at school. I gathered that they were under convenient suspicion of developing mumps. Jim had a magnificent crop of early new potatoes and needed the family labor for a couple of days.

Half an hour after my arrival he drove up in the hearse with a load of cut-price sacks and boxes. He was amazed to find Nur Jehan in his kitchen and on excellent terms with everyone — except the jackdaw who was outside and cursing. Mrs. Melton had considered it natural that the stallion should try to follow me into the house, again confirming my suspicion that she was half or altogether a gipsy.

The dark gentleman had not been seen and had made no approach to Fred Gorble. Mrs. Melton was sure of that. Ever since the evening when she had called on Gorble and muddled him with messages from a fictitious and mysterious lady whom the gentleman was supposed to be secretly visiting, she had been accepted as Gorble’s adviser in the whole tricky and possibly profitable business.

The tiger had put through his telephone call at the appointed time, and had been informed by two simple “No’s” that there had been no inquiries about his movements and that I had left the Warren. Encouraged by these replies, he had asked two more questions and again given a date and time when he would telephone for the answers. Meanwhile Gorble had received through the post an envelope with twenty much-used pound notes in it. Damned if Mrs. Melton hadn’t managed to get hold of five of them!

The two new questions were: what had I been doing at Hernsholt and who was my companion? The first was easy to answer. Everyone knew that I had been watching badgers. The second question was harder, for at the cottage I had been alone. Gorble asked Mrs. Melton to get the required information.

Neither she nor Jim knew anything about my attempt to trap the dark gentleman at the badger sett. So far as they were aware, I never had any companion; but, if I did, it could only be Colonel Parrow. Mrs. Melton knew there was something mysterious in my relations with Ian, so she had not answered the truth. She informed Gorble triumphantly:

“Another perfesser!”

She couldn’t have done better. That would dispel the tiger’s suspicions that the goat had been deliberately tied out.

She gave me two other bits of information which fitted neatly into what I already knew. The first call had come from Bath. Fred Gorble heard the operator say: “You’re through, Bath.” The second came from somewhere abroad, through the continental exchange.

So much for tampering with the enemy’s sources of intelligence. But all I had really gained was the certainty that he had no intention of returning to Fred Gorble and had discovered some surer base for attack.

Now that I knew it, it stood to reason. Why go to the trouble of planting those squirrels unless he had decided where to stay and how to take advantage of them? And whatever base he had arranged for murder in the Wen Acre Plantation would serve for murder anywhere else in the central and southern Cotswolds. He might be staying under a false name at a Bath or Bristol hotel. He might be using his true name —playing his distinction and money for all they were worth and spending a magisterial week or two, completely above suspicion, under the roof of some county magnate.

I said good-by to this delightful and rascally family — who from me would never take a penny —and told them that neither they nor Fred Gorble were ever likely to hear any more of the dark gentleman. As I was about to mount Nur Jehan, Mrs. Melton offered to read my hand, assuring me that she really did have a gift. I refused. Like most people, I am thoroughly superstitious without believing a word of it. Whether I had a predictable future or not depended on myself, and any foreboding or false confidence could be deadly.

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “The same fate is on the horse and the goat in the same place.”

This was intriguing, for she had picked the symbol of the goat out of my mind and it didn’t seem to have occurred to her —unless she was being professionally mysterious — that the symbol was myself.

Under the circumstances I simply could not resist asking more.

“What about the goat and the tiger, Mrs. Melton?”

She held my hand for that one, and suddenly turned a little pink as if in genuine anger.

“Tormenting poor dumb animals is a thing I won’t ‘ave, and I won’t look at it,” she said.

I rode off. I did not need Mrs. Melton’s muddle of telepathy and second sight to tell me that the reckoning would be painful for one or both. I had given the tiger time to prepare his plan. I had shown him my routine. I had convinced him that I was unprotected. On my way home the attack would come.

I felt equal to him on the bare tops and more than his equal in the wooded valleys where I hid my camp. I was uneasy, but the sanctuary of trees in the dusk is no less because the unknown may be behind or beneath them. I believe that for the animal always, and for man sometimes, fear is only a vivid awareness of one’s unity with nature.

What I did not like was riding along the verge of the roads when it could not be avoided. A passing car and a burst from a Tommy gun seemed altogether too chancy, gangsterish and out of character, but it was a possibility which I had to consider.

Once we may have been in close contact. Soon after dawn on the third day of my journey back from Brackley I was riding Nur Jehan over the uplands not far from the Rollright Stones. Coming downhill to a desolate crossroad which I had to pass, I saw a gray car drawn up by the side of the road. Nothing else was in sight or likely for another hour to be in sight but the low stone walls marking out two chessboards of grass on each side of a little river. There was no simple reason why a car should be parked at that hour commanding the only two roads by which I could come. A single man was in it, slouched down in the driver’s seat and apparently asleep, but the rising sun was on the windscreen and I could not see his face.

If I hesitated and changed direction I should show prematurely that I was on my guard; if I rode straight ahead I must pass the car at a range of a couple of yards. I compromised by dismounting, unrolling my kit and making a second breakfast. It was a pleasant and natural spot to choose. After half an hour the occupant of the car reversed into the crossroad and drove away. Whether he was awakened by the smell of my coffee or exasperated by my leisurely preparation of it, I never knew.

From here I could have followed the southeastern edge of the Cotswolds and returned Nur Jehan to Chipping Marton in a couple of days. It seemed too soon — a blank ending with all to begin over again and the initiative out of my hands once more. So we traveled west and spent the third night above Broadway.

On the fourth day I followed the watershed to the south, aiming for Roel Gate. This was all open country, silent except for the jingle of Nur Jehan’s bit and the larks which continually sprang up in front of us and hovered singing. On my outward journey I had passed along the edge of it, wishing that I had time to stop and devote a couple of days entirely to the schooling of Nur Jehan. I had arbitrarily set myself Jim Melton’s cottage as a destination and refused to deviate from the stages. But now I had all the time in the world —or as much of it as the tiger was inclined to allow me.

The country seemed short of my own special requirements, which were water for Nur Jehan and close cover for me. So I looked through the list of addresses which Georgina had given me and found a promising spot some three or four miles away, just south of the road from Stow-on-the-Wold to Tewkesbury.

I was welcomed effusively by the hearty lady who owned this immense and probably unproductive farm. Her main interest, to judge by the deep, ripe carpet of dogs around her feet, was the breeding of still more of them. She explained that she was no rider herself — the doggies would be jealous — but that all the pony clubs knew of her lovely barn.