Watcher in the Shadows (23 page)

Another car was in sight, leaping over the rutted track without any regard at all for the springs. I had no doubt that the admiral was in it. He had first made a name for himself in command of a destroyer at the Battle of Jutland, and he attacked an empty road in the same spirit. I was so glad to see him that I nearly passed out again.

He dashed out of the car, making a commanding gesture to the passengers in the back that they were to stay where they were.

“Great blood and bones, boy! Not got you, has he?”

I told him I was all right except for a cut across the scalp and begged him to do any explaining he could.

“Ah, Cunobel!” Sir Thomas interrupted. “Glad you’re here! You’ll be a great help to me. A guest of mine, the Vicomte de Saint Sabas, has been assassinated.”

“St. Sabas? St. Sabas? I used to know his mother very well.”

The admiral looked questioningly at me, and I nodded.

“I’m afraid this fellow Dennim has taken in the pair of us completely,” Sir Thomas went on. “As it is, I’m having trouble with the police. I insist on his being cautioned and charged.”

“Charge him? Charge my aunt!” Cunobel roared. “Bougrez off, Pamellor! Bougrez off, as they say in French! If you want someone to listen to you, you bloody fool, go and send a signal to the Cabinet!”

He knelt down beside me and eased me back onto the police pillow with fatherly tenderness.

“I’ve got Georgina and the Gillon girl in the car. I told ‘em they had to wait till I found out how the land lay. His aunt,” he explained to the inspector, “the only close relative. You’ve had a talk with her on the telephone already, eh? She’s always right, but it takes plain chaps like you and me time to recover, eh? Shall I let them loose, Charles?”

I said doubtfully that I was not a pretty sight. I did not want Benita dragged into this. But he pulled the blanket up to my chin and beckoned to the car.

Benita ran ahead. She gave no other sign of anxiety. She played the well-brought-up Englishwoman, determined to keep a strange world out of our private lives. I had not seen her in the part before, and it disturbed me that her quick, vivid face should be so deliberately empty.

“That blasted horse!” she said.

It took me an appreciable second to remember that she knew nothing. I couldn’t start explaining. I just assured her that a couple of days in hospital were all I needed, and asked after Nur Jehan.

“Daddy is down at the hunt stables,” she answered venomously, “holding his hand after his night out.”

Concentrating on me, she had not taken in the scene at all. She turned pale as she saw the group on the edge of the copse, the serious faces, the blood-stained swabs on the ground. A police sergeant passed carrying by their barrels, wrapped in his handkerchief, the Colt and the Mauser. She understood too much all at once, and the implications of it overwhelmed control.

“So you were expecting someone!”

She burst into passionate tears. Not hysteria. Just the intolerable grief of youth escaping from its education.

Georgina held her.

“I can take it you are not seriously hurt, Charles?” she asked.

“No, dear Georgi.”

“You seem to have been very lucky. Benita, there is no reason to carry on like an Italian whose second cousin has just died of old age.”

“He was so alone,” Benita sobbed. “Always alone.”

“My darling, I had to be,” I answered. “But if it weren’t for you I should be dead.”

Georgina realized that she had no more need to reproach me for stubbornness towards Benita. But she was puzzled. She thought that Benita had in some way averted an attack on me. I tried to explain what I meant: that after surrender to love and the country of one’s love one no longer makes the lonely, empty gestures of a man whose only home is in his pride.

“Engaged to Benita!” the admiral exclaimed. “Couldn’t be better! I never could understand why you carried on as if you wouldn’t see eighty again. Why, when I was in my forties …”

“Yes, Peregrine?” said my aunt.

“Damn it, Georgi, I was in Budapest on the Danube Commission! Look here, Inspector, be a good fellow and keep this under your hat! Miss Gillon is just Nur Jehan’s sister, eh? I mean, it’s her father’s stallion, and that’s the only reason why she is here. You never heard of romance, eh? We don’t want the newshawks bothering them on that one. I give you my word the boy won’t go to trial. But he’s bound to have an awkward week or two.”

The inspector had fallen completely under Cunobel’s charm. He nodded, but remained with pencil poised over his notebook.

“Miss Gillon did not know the —the other gentleman?” he asked.

“Miss Gillon, Inspector,” said Aunt Georgina, “was quite unaware that my nephew was sacrificing himself to catch a murderer. Even I myself was partly deceived. Peregrine, I shall speak to you afterwards. There is no doubt in my mind that you knew a great deal more than you were telling me, and I can only hope that at your club or possibly your wine merchant’s” — we were given to understand that she remembered the Madeira and had put two and two together — “you have made the acquaintance of some other confirmed bachelor who is a person of authority in the Home Office.”

“Yes, Georgi. I know the Assistant Commissioner of Special Branch. But I’m afraid he’s not a bachelor. Is he a bachelor, Inspector?”

“I could not say, sir,” said the inspector stolidly — he wanted to smile, but he was not risking an engagement with Georgina. “Any statement which you wish to make should be given in the first place to Gloucester police.”

Statements. Mr. Dennim told me this. Mr. Dennim told me that. Well, no doubt in weeks or months they would dig up some direct evidence which counsel for the prosecution could not so easily ignore.

The ambulance which arrived and pulled up alongside the inspector depressed me even more. I should have been glad enough to see it two hours earlier; but now it emphasized the immediacy of the parting from Benita and too sudden a plunge from the savagery of the night into inhuman tranquillity. What had this white, impersonal machine for the mending of bodies to do with a darkness which was more real than the warmth of the sun on my face? I spoke and lived in the present, but the optic nerves were still trying to distinguish my enemy from trees.

“Almighty wings, you aren’t going to bung ‘em both in together, are you?” Cunobel protested.

I looked to my left. St. Sabas, carried on a stretcher, was about to pass behind me.

“Put me down beside that gentleman,” he said.

It was a surprisingly clear and definite whisper. The two bearers hesitated. I raised myself on my elbows and looked at him. He was entirely covered by blankets. His once dark face was icy white. The lobe of his left ear was shot away but had stopped bleeding. They had not bothered with that at all in the urgency of his other wounds. He tried to smile.

“Please put him down,” I said.

It never occurred to me to say anything else. That we should speak seemed so natural. What we had shared we had shared.

“Graf von Dennim, I have lain there thinking about you. I wanted to say that I believe you. I think I did believe you even at the inn. I have had enough to do with officers of the —of the service which duty compelled you to join. They are not men of courage.

“Apology is a meaningless word for us. And forgiveness, perhaps. But I wish to ask you a question. May I?”

“Of course.”

“She only walked? She was quite dead?”

“She was already dead, St. Sabas.”

“Thank you,” he gasped. “You could not know who or what she was. I am proud that when she had nothing more to give she could still be of use. And now —you said something which made me believe you had respect for my name.”

“I do.”

With a last hoarse whispering from bis indomitable energy he broke into rapid German. He must have spoken it perfectly when he was in a state to remember words.

“Then I will dare to appeal to you. I do not want to be saved. Your first shot went through me. The kidney, I think. But the damned doctors might patch me up for the scaffold yet. Your second cut the femoral artery. I put on a tourniquet. I thought I might still crawl. Thank God I could not! So at last there was nothing left to do but think.

“They have put their own tourniquet on. Under the blanket I am about to undo it. The result will be obvious if I am lifted off the ground. Please, if you can, keep me with you a moment.”

Sir Thomas Pamellor was busy giving orders to which no one paid any attention. The inspector, momentarily confused by him, could not intervene effectively. But the evidence of collusion between St. Sabas and myself was suspicious. So was the interest on the faces of the admiral and Georgina.

“Were you able to follow what was being said, sir?” the inspector asked.

“Never could understand German!” Cunobel lied. “Impossible language!”

“I am so sorry. Nor do I,” said Georgina.

“I’m not going to stand for it, Inspector!” Sir Thomas exclaimed. “This is a clear case of attempted murder. I know very well what the vicomte is going to say. It’s what I’d do myself. A great, Christian gentleman …”

“I am neither,” St. Sabas murmured. “Bend down, Inspector! Take my statement and do not interrupt! I, Raoul Philippe Humphrey, Vicomte de Saint Sabas, of Saint Sabas in the Department of Maine et Loire, solemnly declare that I endeavored to kill — to assassinate this gentleman and that he has killed me in self-defense. The motive remains between him and myself. If ever he can bring himself to make it public, he will only do honor to his own name and will give such little as he can to mine.

“I confess that in Western Germany I killed three war criminals named Gustav Sporn, Walter Dickfuss and Hans Weber. I do not regret it. I regret only that I should have wasted so much of my life upon so worthless a compulsion.

“I confess, too, with bitter shame and sorrow, that it was I who sent the bomb which killed a postman serving Charles Dennim’s house, and I desire that the welfare of the man’s family shall be a first charge upon my estate. If brought to trial, I should plead insanity. Death is a very kind deliverance, for me as for my dear wife.”

He freed his left hand from the blanket and held it out to Sir Thomas Pamellor.

“Will you hold my hand a minute —for old friendship?”

“You —you —you murdered a postman!” Pamellor stammered.

The hand fell to the ground, so limp that it made an audible little thud.

“No one,” St. Sabas muttered. “No one knows enough. Only Dennim.”

“I have always understood, Savarin,” I answered.

He drew out his right hand, bright red and dripping, and laid it on the turf between us with the last of his strength. For the few seconds which were left it was I who held it between my own.