A Time to Kill (5 page)

Losch’s property was on a corner site. The front of the house was separated from the main residential road by a short, well-gravelled drive. This eastern side, said Pink, was to be avoided at all costs; the gravel crunched under the lightest of steps, and the drive was overlooked by the house across the road, where he claimed to have seen a man with a typewriter staring out of the window.

On the two interior sides, south and west, the garden was surrounded by a six-foot brick wall, with broken glass on top, suggesting that some previous owner had disliked his neighbour’s children. The north side, flanking a second residential street, was divided from the pavement by a stiff hedge and shrubbery. Across the street was the coppice of pine trees where we were.

‘I’ll show you your station,’ said Pink. ‘Up after me, and no noise!’

He led me up a pine with conveniently spaced branches. Perched securely some twenty-five feet above the ground, we could see the whole northern side of the house and quite a bit of the front. Opposite us, beyond the shrubbery, was a flower-bed and then a flagged kitchen yard where was the door of Pink’s coal cellar. He had been inside earlier in the week, and found that the second door, which led from the cellar into the house, had a lock which could easily be cut clean out.

Otherwise it was a house that would have been thoroughly approved by the police. The downstairs doors and windows were solid, and carefully locked. Indeed, we saw Losch and a manservant methodically checking and closing them all. Then we watched the chequer-board of lights winking on and off upstairs, and followed the routine of a respectable house putting itself to sleep. It seemed to be inhabited only by Losch and a married couple.

After midnight Pink swung himself down to earth like some bearded tar of the days of sail, and slipped away beneath the trees. I saw him nip across the road into the garden next to Losch’s. He preferred the wall with its broken glass to the longish process of pushing through a hedge on a road that was too long, too straight and too well lighted.

From my tree I had a clear view of the tidy ribbon of street, the hedge and the kitchen yard. The wind was blowing up from the south-west, and the branches began to fan back and forth. After a quarter of an hour the local cop strolled down the road and flashed his light into the grove where I was. I watched that confounded beam in terror lest it should lift, but fortunately he was searching for indecent behaviour rather than burglar’s mates. As soon as he had passed on, I saw Pink glide along the doors of the kitchen yard and disappear into one of them. I listened, but I couldn’t hear his tools at work. The only sounds for long minutes were the shriek of a little owl, who saw and disapproved of me, and the distant movement of heavy lorries far away in the centre of Bournemouth.

The dark block swallowed Pink and slept on, presenting to me walls of absolute, blank negation. Never have I had so disturbing an impression of the European house. From the moment that the builder has hung the front door and put in the black glass of windows, no one can know – I mean know, not imagine – what goes on within. A house is impenetrable as a man, and its eyelessness more uncanny.

Between the flicking of the tossed branches I thought I saw a finger of light stab into one of the downstairs rooms. If it were really there, it meant that Pink had emerged from the basement and was on his way up. I was confident that he wasn’t as nervous as I. Yet how could he be sure that he wouldn’t trip over something? How on earth could he know that one of the three people in the house was not awake and listening? Sitting safely in my pine, I couldn’t imagine a viler way of making a living than burglary. It must, I suppose, have a damnable fascination. After all there is no other skilled civilian craft which can be exercised in a state of wild excitement.

My heart pumped intolerably – no other action being open to it – when I saw, this time quite clearly, a tiny pool of light on the floor of the bedroom which we believed to be Losch’s. Through the open door of that room Pink had caught his glimpse of a sunlit passage and of the white tiles beyond, which, he would have it, didn’t belong to a bathroom.

I could guess what he was doing – checking his position in the house, so that he could go straight to the door he wanted. He would now be tiptoeing over to the south side of which we knew next to nothing, and far from the illusory safety of the familiar face of brick. I looked at my watch and found it was nearly one. Pink was taking his time over the job with professional patience.

Another ten minutes passed. Then that house burst into life with the violence of an old Bournemouth spinster finding a man under her bed. There was a crash that I could hear from my tree – muffled by walls, but still an unmistakable, calamitous crash. Two front windows were suddenly illuminated. A voice cried
Sir! Sir!
Losch’s light went on, and I saw him grab his dressing-gown and something from the bedside drawer which might have been a gun. I heard a yell, and heavy footsteps drumming on the stairs. All the ground floor windows were flooded with light. The front door flew open. Losch appeared on the steps, shouting for police and blowing a whistle. Then the cop came pounding up the road and round the corner, also blowing a whistle, and dashed into the house with Losch.

There was still no sign of Pink. Where in God’s name, I cursed, was he? And what was I to do? I didn’t dare climb higher into the tree in case I couldn’t get down in time, and I didn’t dare to take to the ground in case I couldn’t get up in time. I can never remember being in such a disgraceful state of dither.

Then at last I saw Pink jump at the downstairs window opposite me with a heavy dining-room chair for battering-ram. The window fell out on the flagged yard with a smash that must have been heard a mile away. He followed, dived over the hedge, parting the top of it like a horse through the brushwood of a steeplechase jump, and landed on his hands. He kicked his feet clear, and charged across the road into the pines. His figure was extraordinary; it flashed through my mind that his back must have been broken in a struggle. Then I saw him hauling the vasculum out of his blouse; it was that which had given him his pigeon-breasted appearance. Without a word he dropped it at the foot of my tree, bolted back on to the road and started to sprint down it with the cop and Losch’s manservant after him.

A black police car shrieked round that respectable corner and joined in the chase. Pink saw or heard it in time, and vanished from the road. The police were out of the car and after him in five seconds, but my money was on Pink. I felt that through heath and gardens he could reach, somewhere, the water of Poole Harbour without ever showing himself for more than the swift crossing of a road.

There was wild excitement around my corner. All the little, well-bred terriers of the district were yapping their heads off and pretending they had noticed something wrong before the human beings. In half a dozen houses the lights were on, and somewhere a woman was having hysterics in the same key as the smaller dogs. Still, nobody had ventured out into the road, and it was evident that this was the moment to pick up the vasculum. I slid down to the ground and grabbed it.

My next move had to be decided on the instant. Anyone walking away ran a risk of being stopped by police and asked politely where he had been – and I hadn’t got the shadow of an excuse for walking through streets that didn’t lead anywhere at quarter past one in the morning. On the other hand, if I stayed where I was, I must chance a search of the coppice by the police.

I compromised and tried to get clear of all those desirable but very noisy residences without leaving cover. It couldn’t be done. The pines extended over a mere couple of acres in the shape of a triangle. Houses or walls forced me on to one road or the other. No doubt, if I had been Pink, I should have gone on regardless of walls; but the last thing I wanted was to be caught stumbling through somebody’s private property on such a night. So, sticking feebly to my legal right to be on common land, I plunged into a clump of massive rhododendrons on the edge of the eastern road. They were old enough and strong enough for me to stand uncomfortably between two forks a few feet off the ground.

I was only just in time. Bournemouth police went through that coppice like a dose of methodical salts. They couldn’t, of course, be sure that the escaped burglar had an accomplice, but, if he had, that bit of cover was the place for him. They found with ease that very climbable tree, marked by our shoes and those of uncountable boys, and they sent an active young detective up it. That gave them the idea of flashing lights into the tops of all the trees – as well as on the ground under the bushes. They had a quick look at my rhododendrons, but since I was, as it were, in the middle air, they missed me. While the puddle of light crept below my feet, I found myself using the most obscene mental language against the guiltless Roland, not against Pink – thereby coming into line with my absent and anxious Cecily.

At two, when all was clear and the residents of that select district had returned to bed, I ventured out and slunk rapidly down the road, with the strap of the vasculum over my shoulder. My imagination, violently stimulated in the rhododendrons, had produced a possible story for anyone who asked me to account for myself. I was going to say that I had been out catching moths.

I turned a couple of corners and then walked, trying to remember that I was a citizen confident of his innocence, straight along the pavement to the lot, some four hundred yards away, where I had parked my car. When I came to a bright street lamp I stopped, rather abruptly and without forethought, to satisfy my curiosity about the possible contents of the vasculum. This unexpected halt caught my follower on the wrong foot. I heard his steps and looked round. He did his best to appear to be casually crossing the road. I didn’t open the vasculum, and pretended to be looking at my watch. There was nothing more that I or the unknown could do without arousing mutual suspicion, so on we walked, he about fifty yards behind me and now on the other side of the road.

I was half-way to safety and my car when I met a solitary constable. I wished him good night in what I hoped was a cultured and respectable tone, and he was, I think, going to pass on after a sharp scrutiny when a voice shouted with surprising authority:

‘Constable, stop that man!’

There was nothing to be gained by bolting, so I smiled at the cop and said that, Good Lord, I hoped I hadn’t been trespassing or anything.

My follower came running up. He had a sharp, unshaven face and a muffler tucked untidily into his waistcoat. He looked, to my relief, a bit woolly and intellectual. The police don’t like that sort; they have a mildly Hellenic idea that the just man should also be beautiful. I had little doubt that the word of a decent and innocent business-man would be taken against the stranger’s.

‘I live opposite Dr Losch’s house,’ he said with a keen precision, ‘which has just been broken into. I saw this man leaving the trees across the road in a suspicious manner. I wish you to question him.’

‘What trees? I’ve been in a lot of trees,’ I protested indignantly. ‘I’ve been watching moths.’

‘May I have your name and address, sir?’ asked the policeman with judicial neutrality.

I gave it him, together with my business card and some odd letters in my pocket.

‘That’s quite all right, sir. And might I see what you have in that there tin case?’

I opened it with a silent prayer that Pink had laid off Dr Losch’s silver. There was nothing inside but a few twigs of thorn. The thorn wasn’t like any English thorn that I knew. In the semi-darkness I couldn’t see whether the twigs were inhabited.

Pink’s success swung me straight into a fighting mood. I don’t mean that I wanted – far from it! – any sort of depressing violence. I do mean that all motives, all doubtings of conscience, were cleared up. I could have faced a general, even the angriest of them.

‘That’s quite all right, sir,’ the constable said. ‘And perhaps you would tell me where you’re for now.’

‘Back to my car. A grey saloon parked just off the road two hundred yards on. You may have noticed it as you came along.’

‘I am very sorry to have troubled you,’ the stranger said to me, with a slight roll of his r’s, ‘and you too, constable.’

‘That’s quite all right, sir,’ the cop replied – his continual, unmoved
all rights
reminded me of an unintelligent father comforting his children. ‘Our job would be a sight easier if all the public was as helpful. Now you’re one as notices things, and if you could remember seeing the
right
man …’

‘You know what he looks like?’ the stranger interrupted eagerly.

The man as the police would like to interview, sir, is—’ He opened his notebook and refreshed his memory. ‘Height about six feet. Build, stronganactive. Brown beard. Nose been broken. Wearing dark-blue battle-dress or garment resembling the same. Might be a seaman.’

‘Nose broken,’ repeated the stranger. ‘Is anything known of his politics?’

‘He didn’t hardly stop long enough to have a friendly chat,’ the policeman grinned.

He said good night, and moved on into the dark and obedient road. The stranger walked along with me towards my car, apologizing fulsomely and making it appear that he accompanied me merely because he could not bring himself to stop talking. I wasn’t in the least afraid of him; indeed, I wanted him to give some more of himself away. That question of his about Pink’s politics was so utterly unEnglish. As if anyone could know what were the politics of a burglar! It looked to me as if the question had been automatic – which well it might be, if my inquisitive friend had had any police training behind the Iron Curtain.

He tried to entangle the conversation in moths, but I wasn’t having any. I just said that the lepidoptera of towns were a most interesting study, and passed on to simulated enthusiasm over the trees and gardens of Bournemouth.

So we came to the car. He stood talking, evidently reluctant to let me go without a clearer personal impression of me. The facts he had already – my name, my home and business addresses, and the number of my car. I gossiped away as if I loved the man, for I held all the cards. With every moment I was growing more suspicious of him, and he, as he listened to my prattlings of wife and family, had less reason to be suspicious of me. I even offered to run him home, if he would tell me where was this Dr Losch about whom all the fuss had been and to whom, he said, he lived opposite.