A Time to Kill (6 page)

No, he couldn’t think of it. And we were standing by the car, arguing with warm politeness about whether he would take a lift or not, when Pink charged out of the bushes and caught the man a clip on the side of the head that knocked him flat in the road.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I shouted, as if I’d never seen Pink before in my life. ‘By God, it’s the chap the policeman described!’

Pink stood there, hesitant, with an air of raging stupidity as of some brute of a dog which has just attacked the postman and been called to order.

The stranger raised himself on one elbow, and coolly flashed a light on Pink’s face.

‘The Portuguese police would like him, too,’ he said.

I think that was no more than an inspired guess – on the evidence of the twisted nose and the opportunity that Pink, if he were still alive, might have had of penetrating Holberg’s secrets – by a man who had stored in his professional memory every single relevant fact.

Pink’s face showed that the shot had gone home; also he dropped his hand to the pocket where his gun ought to have been and, as I then thanked God, was not.

The stranger turned his back on us and walked steadily away. It must have been obvious to him that, whoever I was, I wanted to avoid a scandal, and that this was the moment to extricate himself. But he was certainly putting a courageous trust in English law and order.

‘You blazing, bloody idiot!’ I hissed at Pink. ‘What on earth did you do that for?’

‘Damn you! He’s the chap with the typewriter who watches Losch’s house,’ he answered furiously.

‘Well, what of it?’

‘God, Taine! Do you think that after all that trouble I’d let him force his way into your car and get the case back?’

I explained, choking with forced patience, that I was trying to persuade him to get in, and that he hadn’t the slightest suspicion of me.

‘Well, how could I know, with half a gale blowing from me to you?’ he roared. ‘Lord, man, I was thinking of the country, not your politenesses!’

‘Pink, the trouble with you is that you hit first and think afterwards,’ I said, ‘country or not. For God’s sake, shave off that beard and change your clothes and get out of Poole Harbour tonight. Where will I find you?’

He stormed some more to cover his misery. And misery it was – though I doubt if I had realized then that Pink knew when he had made a fool of himself as quickly as anyone else.

‘I’ll go round to West Bay,’ he grumbled. ‘I’ve kept pretty quiet up the harbour, and there’s lots of beards about. It’ll take the police a few days to get on to the chap who was living in
Olwen
, and by that time your fellow Roland will be able to call ’em off.’

He looked hard at me, as if trying to find enough friendliness left in my eyes for him to sink his pride and ask a favour.

‘Get him to give me a break over that Portuguese business if he can.’

I assured him curtly that of course I would, and that everything possible would be done for him if the ticks proved the truth of his story. Then I said goodbye. Poor Pink! I wonder how many times in his life he had been within reach of astounding success, and then had to listen to some commanding officer – or mere associate, such as I – blistering him with contempt and anger.

Even there at the roadside I could see what disastrous complications he had introduced into the beautiful simplicity of his raid. He had not only wrecked his own clever and heroic effort to prove his own death, but he had given away the reason why Losch’s house had been entered, and warned at least one interested party. Whatever the reason why the stranger watched the house, he couldn’t have known that it had been broken into for any purpose but plain theft. His attitude both to me and to the policeman had shown that he was consumed by curiosity, utterly in the dark, and had not even recognized the contents of the vasculum for what they were.

When I left Pink, I drove straight home. I can’t blame myself for that decision. I wanted to see Cecily and assure her that all was well. I also wanted to telephone my clerk when he turned up at the office at nine, and tell him what to do about my appointments and how to excuse my absence. It was a perfectly natural decision for the father of a family with a one-man business. There was no point in charging off to Roland then and there. I wasn’t afraid of anything the stranger could do. I didn’t think he was likely to set the police on me, and, if he did, I should have no difficulty in persuading any of my acquaintances at County Headquarters to accompany me and the vasculum to London, and hear the truth of the story.

I got home soon after three, dragged Cecily out of bed to join me in a drink she didn’t want, and had a look at the contents of the vasculum in a good light. The thorn twigs were well inhabited; there was a score of little black and motionless dots under and on the tips of the leaves. Cecily was rather silent. She tried to echo my note of triumph – for I did feel that I had reason to be proud of my belief in Pink – but she didn’t sound quite real. Like many women who are by nature guarded and thoughtful, her true opinion is to be found not in what she says, but in the inflexions of her voice when she says it.

‘Why didn’t you go to Roland straight away?’ she asked.

‘I wanted to see you,’ I answered.

‘You should have thought of that earlier,’ she said.

It was an obscure remark, but it made me feel guilty. During the war she was a model Spartan wife. In time of peace, however, avoidable anxiety is not fair.

I slept heavily and late. She, I gathered, did not; for she told me in the morning that three cars, or the same car three times, had passed our house just before dawn. That was, indeed, a rare event on our country road, but I wasn’t, or refused to be impressed. I considered it quite possible that the stranger, thanks to Pink, had come early from Bournemouth to have a look at my house, and what of it? After all we were in well-policed England, and this time – unlike that very unpleasant night the previous autumn when I was on the run – the police would be on my side.

Cecily took Jerry and George to school in the village. After that she was going to see the vicar – for some reason it is impossible in the country to indulge in any normal community activity without seeing the vicar – so she said goodbye until the evening. I finished my bacon and eggs, and then picked up the telephone to call my office and to make an appointment with Roland. The line was dead.

I went outside to see if the wire from my house to the pole had been interfered with. It hadn’t. Then I remembered that the night had been blustery, and I declined to be affected by Cecily’s mood of foreboding. The line, after all, went dead at least once a year. It passed under half a mile of chestnuts which were always drooping their heavy branches over it, in spite of the work of the Post Office linesmen and their saws.

There was no point in driving up to the village just to find that all the lines, and not only mine, were down; so I set out for Dorchester. I was cautious, but not at all convinced that I had any reason to be. I reckoned that if my telephone had really been cut by some crazy outfit, normally inhabiting the world of Pink, their only purpose was to gain time to escape. The game was up for them, and any strong-arm stuff would merely set the whole machinery of the police in action. I took only one precaution, and that was to unload Pink’s gun in case I had to frighten someone with it.

I also intended to drive pretty fast, but that I could not do. Half a mile from my house I caught up a plain, dusty black van which would not let me pass. Even this was not conclusive. On our twisting roads a slow and nervous driver can hold up the car behind him for bend after bend. Then the van stopped in the middle of the road and spilled out two men from the double doors at the back.

They darted straight at my car. I was out of it on the instant, and held them up with Pink’s gun. They gave me no trouble. I was a bit of an expert in house-to-house fighting towards the end of the war, and for a naturally peaceful man I can put on a convincing show of ferocity. These two chaps were well trained, too. They kept their hands up, and their eyes on my face without flickering off for a moment; and that, since another couple were creeping up behind me, must have been difficult.

The spacing of the attack was perfect. The other two had been hiding behind the hedge just round the corner of an open gate. I had only just time to half-turn my head when my arms were grasped, and a pad of some anaesthetic forced over my face. There was so little chance to put up an effective struggle that I wasn’t even hurt beyond a few bruises. My arms and legs were securely held, and the more I heaved, the more I inhaled that damned chloroform mixture.

When I recovered consciousness I was on the floor of the van, neatly tied up and fairly comfortably settled on a pile of sacking. I don’t think I had been laid out for more than a few minutes, for I felt well enough after all the vivid dreams had cleared away. The stranger from Bournemouth and another man were with me. They had the vasculum. I decided that there was nothing whatever to be gained by anger or protest.

‘How the devil do you think you are going to get away with this?’ I asked as reasonably as I could manage. ‘You aren’t in Russia, you know.’

‘In Russia there is fortunately no need for this violence,’ the stranger answered.

Well, I suppose he was right. The population must be even more law-abiding than in England. They’d better be.

‘But, my dear sir,’ I told him, ‘my office, my wife, everybody will be looking for me.’

‘Naturally! And so I shall not keep you more than a few hours.’

‘You’ll have the police after you before that.’

‘It is possible,’ he replied with a half-smile that held in it a weary fatalism. ‘But you did not want to appeal to the police last night, and I do not think you can have done so since.’

‘And what about my car?’

‘That? That has been driven away. I needed it. I will explain to you later.’

It is curious how one attaches quite a different meaning to the same face according to the circumstances in which one sees it. I had first thought of this man as fussy and eager and considering himself too intelligent for Bournemouth. Then, as we walked together to my car, I put him down as some grubby sort of foreign agent. Now I saw that he was a man of a certain melancholy power, as cool and concentrated as some professional bridge-player calculating how far his poor hand can be used to wreck his opponents. Yet all the time I was looking at the same face, with its sharp nose and thin mouth, and eyes set exceptionally close together so that his gaze focused for exact clarity of the object before him, to the exclusion of all vaguer shadows at the side.

His real name I do not know. His assistants addressed him, with considerable respect, as Yegor Ivanovitch. That Russian custom of using the patronymic instead of the surname must be most useful in revolutionary circles. From the moment I woke up in the van he never made any attempt to hide the fact that he was a Russian security officer. Indeed, he had every interest in letting me know it. We were, from his point of view, unwilling allies.

I lay on the sacking for about three-quarters of an hour of fairly fast driving. We passed through no big town. I noticed in the last phase, a short, steep hill with sharp bends; then a mile or two of straight and a turning. At this point the other chap in the van stuffed my ears with cotton-wool and pulled a black bag over my head. Ivanovitch assured me that I need fear nothing.

Now we went down a long slope over a roughish road; and after it, just before we stopped, came an abrupt leap upwards which I took to be the drive into a house. I was carried out of the van and down some steep steps. I was then set free of bag, ear-plugs, cords and all, and found myself in a basement room or cellar, carpeted and fitted up with table and chairs. It had no windows, and was lit by a modern paraffin lamp.

Yegor Ivanovitch offered me a drink with the unmistakable neutrality of a policeman. His manners, perhaps, simulated cordiality more lightly than those of Scotland Yard. He seemed to consider drinking a ceremony which had its own rules, however unpleasant the business to follow. Of that I was glad, for I badly needed a moment’s relaxation.

‘And now,’ he said, offering me a chair at the table, and taking one himself at the opposite side, ‘let us have a talk. You have done me a great favour.’

I didn’t much care for this surprising opening, or for my position on the wrong side of his temporary desk; so I smiled and said nothing.

‘These “moths” you were collecting …’ he went on. ‘But it seems that everything else you told me last night was true?’

‘Within reason,’ I answered.

‘Within reason, of course. It may interest you to know that I have made a careful study of English police methods?’

He had a habit, which laid a polite veneer over interrogation, of making a casual, plain statement and ending the sentence as if it were a question.

‘I hope you have profited by them.’

‘Profited? No. They cannot be adapted to our greater economic freedom. I was going to tell you only that I know your police never break the law.’

‘Sometimes they must,’ I answered, hoping that he would take me to have acted in an official capacity.

‘Never! Nor your secret police either, such as they are. No, Mr Taine, you don’t belong to
them
. I think you must be just a friend of Commander …’ and he gave Pink’s real name.

‘No,’ I said. ‘A little more responsible than that.’

Score one for him. I was so anxious to make myself out a person of importance who would be missed at once that I had admitted Pink’s identity.

He did not show the least awareness of his success.

‘More responsible? One of his fascists then?’

‘I’m damned if I was!’

He begged my pardon effusively. However well he knew us, he could not guess that to most Englishmen the word
fascist
was more comic than insulting.

‘This anarchistic, individual patriotism is hard for me to understand,’ he said. ‘There are so many of you English who will act for your country without orders, and never care if you are disowned afterwards. Mr Taine, I am going to assume that you have no sort of official position?’