Watcher in the Shadows (18 page)

“He is only half trained,” I said in order to put the blame for any sudden move on Nur Jehan. “He was brought up as a pet.”

“Yes. Always disastrous. Is he excitable?”

“No. And your mare?”

He was evasive. He did not know. That proved at any rate that the mare did not belong to him. He was the sort of man who would unhesitatingly be lent a good horse.

Whatever move I made must not be obvious. It must appear to this purring tiger that Nur Jehan was solely responsible. I sat loosely and continued to chat. Then I drove my left heel hard into the stallion’s tender rib and prayed that I wouldn’t be thrown.

Nur Jehan failed me. Instead of bucking or bolting, he snorted, shook his head and continued to walk. He clearly liked the horse alongside him and was not going to be deterred from a promising acquaintanceship by carelessness on the part of his rider.

My companion noticed nothing, for he could not see my left leg and I had not gathered my horse. I tried it again. This time Nur Jehan stopped dead, offended and puzzled. He did not particularly resent pressure which he felt to be accidental; what he would not stand was deliberate use of a sore rib to give orders. But the friend on his back was sitting easily and not giving any orders. The circumstances were all wrong.

This considerate rider also stopped. That was what I dreaded and had been trying to avoid. Unless we were to stay there all night I had to start first and allow him to remain for a decisive second or two behind me. I played the inefficient horseman and sawed at Nur Jehan’s mouth, who began to dance.

“Completely untrainable!” I shouted angrily.

“Weren’t you perhaps a little hard on his mouth?”

“Damn his mouth!”

“Patience, my dear sir!” advised my executioner very pleasantly. “Patience always leads to the result you want in the end.”

He had now started to ride with half his right hand stuffed carelessly into his outside coat pocket. He went ahead for a moment and crossed my path on the excuse of looking closely at some sheep which he pretended to admire. He made it extremely difficult for me to avoid coming up on his right. Riding side by side in that position I had no defense against a shot through the pocket and into the liver — or into anywhere if the unseen weapon were of sufficient caliber to knock me off my horse.

To follow him and come up on his left was awkward, but Nur Jehan’s behavior was perfect. He danced just enough to disguise the fact that the edging to the left was deliberate. We rode on over the turf, both breaking from canter to walk a little abruptly but not so unreasonably as to be unnatural. I had an irrelevant and vivid vision of some gymkhana or riding school — so long ago that I could not remember which and certainly did not try —at which I had to turn an obstinate pony among posts. This despairing exercise upon which I was now engaged had equally simple rules. Come up on your companion’s right and you are dead. But you must not be caught avoiding it, nor he trying to force you into it.

The icy sweat which had been dripping down my ribs and over my too imaginative liver was under control. I was a trifle more confident. This man, as I suspected, was not a gambler; otherwise he would have brought his hand up and across the saddle. He had the experience to know it was not so easy as for the cowhands of fiction. At the appearance of the pistol, the target would start, the horse between the target’s legs following the movement of alarm enough to throw off the aim. I myself could have taken the risk. I would have waited for horse and man to steady and still been sure of killing even if the range had opened to ten yards.

That one advantage — though largely imaginary — cheered me a little. And now came another. The man was losing that patience of which he had boasted.

“A wonderful spot for a gallop,” he invited.

It was. Nur Jehan was most unlikely to hold off the challenge of that powerful mare. From my companion’s point of view nothing could stop him overhauling his victim close enough to touch the unsuspecting back with the barrel. But I was not unsuspecting, and he had given me a slim chance. I had to take it, and hope for an opportunity to change direction — down to the farms and human eyes.

I had allowed Nur Jehan a few healthy gallops, but never before had I ridden him flat out. My little Persian Arab was off like a greyhound from a trap, a start with which the heavier mare could not compete at all. My low voice and knees must have communicated to him an urgency which demanded response.

After a hundred yards I looked round. The mare was coming up on my left and ten to twenty paces behind. Nur Jehan seemed to be holding his own, though how much of it he had gained at the start I could not tell. Three hundred yards. Nearly four hundred yards. And then a stone wall, new and without a gap, which meant that I must pull him up.

But away to the right were the chimneys of a cottage and safety. Could Nur Jehan jump? What could he jump? At least he had managed to get over the untidy hedges of Gillon’s glebe meadow. But if he hit a Cots-wold wall it was the end of the pair of us. A pistol shot wouldn’t be necessary. A stone while I was lying on the ground would do the job neatly and leave no evidence of murder.

I did not dare to steady the stallion. I made my intention plain and sat still. Nur Jehan, wildly excited, took off a couple of yards too soon. There was only the faintest click as a hind shoe touched the wall, and he was away again in his stride.

I swung off to the right into a wide grass track leading downhill between wire fences. Once there I could dictate the closeness and position of my companion. I looked over my shoulder in time to see him check the mare and jump compactly. Then he broke into an easy canter as if waiting for me to come back and join him.

I pulled up Nur Jehan and also waited. I was safe. A farmer and some white-coated vet or inspector were examining bullocks in the next field. The upper windows of the cottage which had showed only a tall chimney were in full view. I leaned forward to pat Nur Jehan’s neck, and under cover of the movement extracted the Mauser from its awkward holster and tucked it inside my shirt with the barrel down the waistband of my breeches. It was very uncomfortable and hindered riding at any pace but a walk. I felt confident, however, that from then on if the tiger drew any kind of lethal weapon he would still have his paw in plaster when he came up for trial.

As I showed no sign of moving from where I was, he joined me.

“A remarkable burst of speed for an untrained Arab,” he said genially. “I thought you were down at that wall. But, my dear sir, what a risk to take!”

“He was bolting,” I replied. “He might have charged right into it.”

That earned me a slow, penetrating look, but I had the answer ready to avert suspicion.

“I have no curb, you see,” I explained. “He is not accustomed to it. But of course we should not have allowed you to tempt us.”

I asked him to come down and have a drink with me. Now that I was momentarily safe, contact had to be maintained. I might be able to maneuver him into making an attack before witnesses, or I might discover his identity and regain the initiative.

We walked our horses down to the village below. The only evidence of its existence was a carpet of great tree-tops, the roof of a Jacobean manor and the church tower which I had pointed out to Benita in, as it now seemed, some former life. My companion chatted easily and amicably. He was a superb actor. I should have been left unaccountably dead upon the empty turf above us if I had not been able to take that long look through the hedge on the road from Stoke to Hernsholt and watch his face when it had been undisguisedly intent upon revenge.

The village street was fairly deserted. It was broad enough to hold a small country market and gently curving, with perhaps thirty houses on one side, divided by the inn, and twenty on the other, divided by the church. All were of stone and none — except for a village school in false Gothic — was later than the eighteenth century. The low sun brought out the gold of the Cotswold masonry and tiles.

“They are the most beautiful villages in Europe,” said my companion.

I answered at once that they were, and was surprised that my reply had not been in the least conventional. The Tyrol? Spain? Alsace? Would I have agreed unhesitatingly the day before, or was this the influence of Benita? I confirmed that the essential button of my shirt was undone and the butt of the Mauser free. It would be disgraceful to die just when my eyes had become English.

A short lane led us along the side of the inn to its yard.

There was a garage but no stable. We hitched our horses to the railings and went into the yard, where the flagstones had been roughly diversified by a few rock plants and stone troughs. There were two iron chairs and a rustic table for any customers who preferred to drink in the open.

My companion walked straight to the table and sat down. I remained standing and asked him what he would take.

“It doesn’t matter,” he answered, and then, as if aware of the oddness of his reply, added with more animation:

“Whisky. Scotch, if you will be so good.”

I had to turn my back on him in order to enter the garden door of the pub. I didn’t like it, but hoped the windows which overlooked us would keep him out of temptation. When I returned from the bar with a tray, both hands occupied, I carefully observed the position of the other pair of hands. They were both on the table and looked a little unnatural. Left alone to do some thinking, he may have come to the conclusion that I did not accept strangers so trustfully as it appeared. That jumping of the wall, that bearing to the right and safety, could well have been deliberate.

With the drinks on the table, I pretended to drop my matches and stooped to pick them up. The Mauser was now on my lap. I was sitting opposite to him and it could not be seen. My coat hid it from the bar window. I drank half my whisky and noticed that my fellow horseman merely touched the glass to his lips.

“Your name is von Dennim, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Dennim. I have dropped the von.”

“Yes, I can understand it. When you have finished your drink may I ride back with you to the top of the hill?”

I asked him if that was his way home. He replied, still quite pleasantly, that it was not, but that he wished for more of my company. He stressed the word “wish.” If I were thinking of escape, I should recognize it as an order. If I were still unsuspicious, there was nothing to frighten me in the slight arrogance of tone.

This was the end. The tiger had committed himself. I could act.

“Lower your head to pick up, for example, your handkerchief,” I told him, “and you will observe that I too have you covered. My legs are crossed and I am sitting sideways. From under the table you can only give me a painful wound. If I see the slightest sign of your raising that pistol above it, I will kill you. Is that clear?”

He looked at me with such a blaze of hatred that I was on the very edge of firing. Very gradually madness died away and was replaced by an ironical detachment far more in keeping with the face.

“So you know what I have to say to you?”

“What you said to Sporn, Dickfuss and Weber. But the game is up.”

“The game is not up, von Dennim. As you say —or did you say it? — you dare not shoot first.”

I pointed out that he had an automatic in his hand, that I should be justified in killing him and acquitted.

“Perhaps,” he answered coolly. “Only perhaps. It is going to be very hard to connect me with any of those executions. However frightened you are, I do not think you will shoot first.”

I was astonished to find that I was no longer particularly frightened.

“If this is stalemate, as you think,” I said, “you may as well tell me what you have against me. You were never in Buchenwald.”

“No — but my wife was.”

“There were no women.”

“Except by invitation.”

I could not understand. My expression must have been exasperatingly patronizing.

“Have you forgotten, von Dennim? Did it mean so little to you? Very well, I will remind you. I like each one of you to know why you are going to die. The Buchenwald officers used certain women from the camp at Ravensbrück for their amusement, did they not? You yourself once fetched a little party of them.”

It was perfectly true. I had conceived the scheme and timed it carefully and at last got the opportunity of fetching such a party from the women’s concentration camp. But I still did not see what it had to do with him or his wife. This was the incident which had brought Olga Coronel over to London after the war to thank me, when she and Georgina decided — rightly, I expect — that I was not in a state to see anyone who could remind me too vividly of the past.

It had been the custom of that unspeakable swine, Major Sporn, to borrow occasionally these unfortunate creatures from Ravensbrück. Besides the political prisoners awaiting the Ravensbr
ü
ck gas chamber, there were plenty of common criminals utterly demoralized and only too glad of a break in their half-starved lives and a chance to drink themselves into a stupor.

On the afternoon when I myself went to Ravensbr
ü
ck, I slipped into my busload of gipsies, thieves and prostitutes Catherine Dessayes and Olga Coronel. They knew that they were to trust me, and that was all. Twelve women had left for Buchenwald — filthy, disheveled, gaudily painted. But was it ten or twelve who arrived?

Sporn, already drunk, didn’t know and didn’t care. I, pretending also to be drunk, had juggled with the two extra — subtracted them, added them, done everything but multiply them. Forty-eight hours later Dessayes and Coronel had been picked up at a secret landing ground and were in hospital in London. Meanwhile I was under arrest; but they couldn’t see how I had worked the trick and they shot the wrong man. At least he was the wrong man from their point of view. Otherwise they could not have chosen a more deserving candidate.

“Your wife could not have been among those women,” I said.

“She was, von Dennim. I know something of what they did to her in every week from her arrest to her death. The men who interrogated her were hanged as war criminals — all but one whom I hanged myself. With Major Sporn and Captain Dickfuss I had the pleasure of dealing when they had served their sentences. And in the course of my conversation with Dickfuss I learned that I had a debt to pay to Weber and you.