A Time to Kill (12 page)

He strolled down to the gate again, and out. I thought that he might be going down to the ledge to finish his cigar by the edge of the sea; but instead of following the little ravine he turned right and started to climb the cliff path. He was using a torch to see his way. As he came up to my level and passed within fifty yards of me, I watched the narrow pool of light travelling briskly along the ground.

The cliff path seemed an unnecessarily difficult route for an evening stroll, so I decided to follow him. Here at long last was a bit of a movement from Fallot’s house which might repay investigation. I squirmed back from the awkward slope where I was lying, and then struck straight up the escarpment over the soundless turf. From the top I looked down on to the path, but there wasn’t a glimmer of torch or cigar. I crept a little nearer to the cliff, and very cautiously – for although there was a stout wire fence to prevent one walking out into a hundred feet of space, the whole hillside was terraced with unexpected quarries.

After a bit, I heard a crackling of sticks well below me and to my left, and moved towards it. The unknown struck a match. I dropped to the ground and tried to resemble a large lump of darkness, for I was within thirty feet of him. Paper caught, sticks flared, and a fire of small logs began to waver and grow. The man then threw a handful of some chemical on the fire, and the flame and column of smoke turned reddish, yet not so red as to be wholly unlike an ordinary fire. Twice he fed it with his powder, then gathered the logs together to give a steady flame, and cleared off down the hill as if the devil was after him. I saw his face clearly in the glare; he was Fallot, the man I had watched saying good-bye – no doubt very thankfully – to our friend and his boy.

I had no doubt what that fire was for. The site of it was cleverly chosen – a flat platform set back into a second step of the cliffs. The fire couldn’t be seen at all by the coastguards on St Alban’s Head to the west, and was fairly sheltered from the east. And if it
were
seen, if even it were investigated, what was it but a summer camper’s fire over which to grill his sausages? Very well that camper had made his fireplace, too, out of flat chippings of Purbeck stone, protected from the wind and with a primitive but satisfactory draught beneath. The stones were well blackened, showing that the beacon had frequently been lit.

I let the light of Fallot’s torch disappear over the edge of the hill, and then I rushed down and kicked those logs out of the fireplace and stamped on them. I thought I saw two sudden and questioning flashes of light from the sea, but they were so quick and so far from the direction in which I had been looking that I could not be sure. A rough compass bearing showed them to have been west-south-west.

It was now my turn to do a bit of signalling. I trotted along the cliff path until I was above the two great caves, and found a long, low gorse bush which would prevent my light being seen from the south-west. Pink’s position was east by south of the caves.

It was hard to decide what to send him. A single flash meant that he was to come in quietly and join me. Three flashes in quick succession would tell him to hang about in the offing as publicly as possible, with all lights lit. That, I reckoned, would certainly cause the strange craft to sheer off, but what might happen up at the house? If the party in Fallot’s cellars – for I was now sure it was there my children were held – chose to escape in the black van or on foot, what on earth could I do to stop them? When we had decided that frightening-off was the game to play, I had not realized the awful blackness of the night. I could pass within twenty yards of my boys, and neither they nor I would know it.

I came to the conclusion that I needed Pink, and needed him quietly. I sent him single flashes. At the fourth my signal was acknowledged by a double speck of light impossible to notice unless one were staring out to sea along a compass bearing. In so vast an emptiness that tiny flick of humanity was comforting as fireplace and friend.

I made my way down to the ledge. As soon as I was past Fallot’s house and off the turf, I had to feel twice with each foot before I dared set it down. Loose stone, old scraps of wire and slippery shale in the gully made vile going for a man who didn’t want to be heard or show a light. The thought occurred to me – and I wish I’d paid more attention to it – that if I had to shift parcels of watches and jewellery I would choose an easier route. It must have taken me as long to reach the sea as for Pink to creep in two miles to his anchorage.

Close to the water there was a little more light, a spectral glimmer provided by the swirl and suck of the waves. I could distinguish the miniature dock, half natural and half split by Purbeck quarrymen, where Pink, if he could find it, intended to land. I walked out along its western arm, and then as far on as I could get over a spit of rock left bare by the falling tide.

I distrust the sea. Its romance in a sunlit, summer haven may pass; its reality, its own dark life among the recesses of a coast, is melancholy and alien. The steps of the ledges behind me, though Ivanovitch and his whole company might, for all I could discern, be squatting on them like gulls, were land and were friendly. But the sea which crept in out of the night and lifted the long strands of weed and plunged back with a smooth, gurgling surge of force was menacing and incalculable.

After a long wait among all these swirlings and reachings for me, I heard at last the plain, familiar sound of oars. It came from the west, the direction in which I did not want to show a light; so I returned to the solid footing of the ledge and tried to get within speaking distance. I was just going to risk a low call to Pink, when a voice from the sea muttered:

‘Verdammte Fallot!’

I hoped that the unknown German was cursing Fallot because the beacon fire had gone out just when most needed.

The dinghy followed the gleam of lightly broken water into a narrow passage that opened between the ledge and the western horn of the cliff. I came up close and, when I heard the sculls shipped and the crunch of the rope fenders, dropped into a handy crack among the limpets and sea anemones. I could just distinguish a tall figure in a white yachting cap who came ashore. He seemed to know where he was, and his footsteps padded away in the direction of the ravine and Fallot’s house. He left behind him a seaman in charge of the boat.

When all was quiet again I went back to the little rock basin and showed a light low down on the water. I could only pray that Pink would approach from the east and land where he should. If he did, I thought it unlikely that the seaman, sitting two hundred yards away, alone in his dinghy among all those noises of bottomless drainpipes, would hear him.

I needn’t have worried. When Pink came I didn’t hear him myself. He was paddling the little pram with a single stern oar, and had muffled the gunwale over which it passed. There wasn’t a creak or a splash as his head came to rest within a couple of feet of my own. He certainly knew his business a good deal better than the man who had landed from the dinghy.

I told him quickly what had happened. He agreed with me that the skipper of the craft lying somewhere in the outer darkness – whose engines he thought he had heard, but wasn’t sure – had come in to get some sort of beacon going again, if it was only his own electric torch. Since his ship didn’t dare to show any lights, he couldn’t find his usual anchorage without help from shore; and more, said Pink, if he couldn’t guide her in to where he wanted her, he would have a tough time finding her at all when he tried to return on board in the dinghy.

‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Where’s
Olwen
?’

‘Close in under the cliff,’ he replied. ‘Give us a clear sky, and you’d pretty near see her from here.’

I said that I had never noticed the beat of the Diesel, and he chuckled with satisfaction. It was his seamanship, I think, which gave him self-respect enough to carry him through personal loneliness and disaster. He explained that he had never used his engine once he was round the point, and had nicely calculated that what wind there was and the set of the ebb-tide would carry him close in to the ledge. He had unshackled his anchor and bent a cable on to it instead of the chain, and the two had gone down without a sound.

‘Roger,’ he said, ‘it’s unlikely, you know, that your friend in the yachting cap has more than one dinghy. And if he has, he’ll have a high old time trying to lay his hands on it.’

‘We’ll give the general alarm if we pinch it,’ I objected.

‘Oh, I don’t think so. The night is so bloody dark, and their plan has gone wrong, and nobody knows where anyone else is. Muddle ’em some more – that’s the game! Skipper is on shore. Dinghy and hand vanish. No way of finding out what’s happened without flashing enough lights to make even a coast guard put down his pipe and think! It might take ’em till dawn before they clear it all up. What was the chap in the dinghy doing when you left him?’

‘Just sitting.’

‘Well, you know how to get up close to him, so you’d better do the job. And I’ll be handy in case of accidents.’

He took a cosh from under his sweater and handed it to me. It was just a steel bar wrapped round with tow.

‘That’s all I could make on board,’ he said apologetically. ‘Now, don’t kill him. He’s earning his living like the rest of us. Just a flick will do.’

Pink moored the pram to what remained of an iron ring, and followed me silently over the ledge. Given patience and slow movement, the job was easy. The man was still sitting in the dinghy with his head on a level with the rock. I didn’t hit him quite hard enough, and he came round soon after we had worked the boat out into the open sea. Pink, however, quickly lashed his hands together with the painter, and threatened urgent death if he opened his mouth.

The seaman lay in the bottom of the dinghy, his head within easy reach of Pink and the cosh. I rowed for five minutes into the softly heaving blackness until Pink ordered me to ship the sculls and we glided up alongside the dim white bulk of
Olwen
.

On board Pink questioned the seaman, who understood a little German and a little English. He was some kind of refugee from the Baltic. Poor devil, he is on my conscience. He didn’t deserve his end; yet I do not see what we could have done to prevent it. He admitted that the yacht had been smuggling, but insisted that he had only been on board a month, and was not in the confidence of the owner – to whom he gave some name that I forget. He couldn’t, naturally enough, tell us exactly where his ship was. He reckoned she was something less than a mile off shore when he rowed the owner in. Her name was
Fiammetta
and her home port was Palermo, but she had been in the Channel for some time. She was reasonably fast and a good sea boat. There was one other hand beside himself, who acted as mate when required and could bring the ship in to her anchorage as soon as the skipper gave a light to steer on. There was no other dinghy.

We tied him up and put him in the glory-hole with Losch. Losch seemed to be resigned to his fate. His eyes, which were all he could move, followed our doings with contemptuous interest. He must have guessed that we were in serious trouble, and been thoroughly satisfied. He knew we meant him no immediate harm. Pink had given him food, drink and a cautious airing when he was clear of Swanage.

We rowed the dinghy back along the cliffs, and left it in a bit of a cave on the extreme east of the ledge, where it was highly improbable that the skipper would ever look. The ebb was going to leave it high and dry on the jagged boulders at the bottom; and if the flood didn’t come in with a wind behind and batter it down to a keel and splintered planks, someone would be the better for a nameless lobster-boat which no owner would ever claim.

It was now after midnight. Fallot’s house, which could have been seen from that far corner of the ledge, was dark. There was no more trace of man than when the Purbeck cliffs were made, and not a sound but the continual wash of the sea. We waited and waited. Once we saw two moving lights in the black sky, which might well have been up on the cliff near the spot where Fallot had built his fire. Once we heard, without a shadow of doubt, the distant beat of quiet engines.

It was an uneasy wait. We were alone on that ledge, and knew it. No one was looking for us; no one was concerned with us. Was that one hand on board cautiously bringing in the ship? Why was nothing happening? Yet there was no object in leaving the ledge for Fallot’s dark house; we couldn’t attempt to break into it, weaponless, against the opposition of Yegor Ivanovitch and his now considerable party. No, even Pink, to whom patience came hardly, admitted that all we could do was to wait until
Fiammetta
’s skipper returned to his dinghy; since he had only one, we must in the end hold the winning hand. It was the hardest wait of my life, for I knew that my children were in shouting distance of me, and yet might be lost by a shout.

I looked at my watch – an hour and a half since the skipper had landed. Long ago he should have signalled
Fiammetta
into her usual anchorage and started to ferry his passengers out to her. That was the moment we longed for – when men would be on the ledge who dared not show a light, men panic-stricken because the dinghy was not there, men scattering to find it. I felt pretty confident that in the confusion I could get my darlings into the pram and away. What was left behind I didn’t care. Yegor Ivanovitch could be trusted to clear up the dead and the evidence.

At last the skipper returned, and alone. We heard him coming, and hid in that cleft, that chain of shallow pools, from which I had watched him land. He was in a hurry, stumbling and splashing carelessly across the ledge. He came to the cut where he had left his man and dinghy, and flashed a torch over the empty water. Then he called:

‘Jan! Jan!’

I felt Pink’s body stiffen beside me.

The skipper turned towards us, cursing in a low, furious voice, and Pink launched himself out of the pool like a leaping fish.

‘Ritter!’ he shouted.

Or was it a shout? To one listening on top of the cliff the noise might have been no more than a sudden and savage recoil of the sea.