Game Without Rules (29 page)

In all the years he had known him, Mr. Behrens had rarely known Mr. Fortescue to leave the square mile of streets between Victoria Station and the Admiralty Arch. It was as great a shock as if, making his way through one of the leafy lanes near his house, Mr. Behrens had come face to face with a London omnibus.

He hastened to open the door.

When they were comfortably seated, and a drink had been offered, and refused, Mr. Fortescue said, “I had business at Dover this morning, and when I saw that my return journey brought me almost through Lamperdown, I thought I would look you up. I had one or two things to tell you, which could not very easily have been said on the telephone.”

Low though they were, Mr. Behrens’ spirits sank still lower.

He said, “It was very good of you to take the trouble.”

“I know that you have been interested in our—” Mr. Fortescue permitted himself a very slight smile, “—in our Operation Prometheus. Calder was, of course, to have been our emissary to Mikalos. When it became perfectly clear that he could not undertake the assignment, we had to find a substitute. The only other available candidate was Commander Harcourt.”

Mr. Behrens found himself thinking of the last occasion on which he had met the commander. He had clearly intended, if no other solution had presented itself, to kill Mr. Calder; and thinking matters over afterward, Mr. Behrens could not find it in his heart to criticise the decision. It is true that the commander had not been thinking of Mr. Calder as a man. He had been thinking of him as an abstract problem in security. But on any grounds, would not Calder have been better dead than in a padded cell?

Mr. Behrens became aware that some comment was expected of him, and said, “Yes. I imagine Commander Harcourt will do the job excellently. He was obviously the man for the job.”

“Unfortunately,” said Mr. Fortescue, “it was just as obvious to the other side.”

Mr. Behrens looked up sharply.

“Has something gone wrong?” he said.

“They must have reasoned that we would surely send Harcourt – we have so few people who know the area and can speak the language. They were obviously on the lookout for him, and picked him up soon after he landed. Unfortunately, before he could talk to Mikalos.”

“Is he dead?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Fortescue. “His body was found. His throat had been cut. It was put down as the work of brigands – Harcourt was travelling as a Greek businessman. No one has officially connected him with us. And we shall, of course, deny all knowledge of him.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Behrens. “You’ll have to find someone else to do the job now, I suppose.”

“Yes – we’ll find a substitute.”

Outside, the autumn afternoon was turning into evening. A group of boys were kicking a football on the green, being careful to keep off the mown cricket square. A little red post truck flashed past in a cloud of dust. Mr. Behrens sighed. Six months ago it had seemed to him that the Old Rectory, the village of Lamperdown, and the County of Kent were all that he needed to keep him happy for the rest of his life.

But now something had happened. A subtle piece of scene changing had been worked. There was a different backdrop, a couple of flats had been whisked away, a change had been made in the lighting and Arcady had become a prison cell.

Rasselas seemed to feel it, too. Ever since Mr. Fortescue had arrived, the big dog had been restless. Now he was lying in a corner of the room, regarding Mr. Fortescue open-mouthed, as if he were the embodiment of the successive disasters which had befallen them.

“In all the time I’ve worked for you,” said Mr. Behrens, “I’ve never yet asked you a favour.”

“True,” said Mr. Fortescue.

“I’m going to ask one now. I want to take over this mission. I have a good working knowledge of Greek and Italian―not enough to pass as a native, but enough, I think, to get over to Mikalos whatever you want him to know.”

“I’m afraid—” said Mr. Fortescue.

“Before you turn it down, bear in mind that if you say no you’re probably going to have two mental cases on your hands, instead of one. If I have to sit here much longer doing nothing, I shall go mad.”

“I can certainly find you a job—”

“I want this particular job.”

“It’s impossible.”

“Why is it impossible?”

“It’s impossible,” said Mr. Fortescue, “because the job no longer exists. It’s been finished.”

Mr. Behrens stared at him. Rasselas was on his feet, hackles up, amber eyes gleaming.

“What do you mean? Quiet, Rasselas. Lie down. I thought you said that you needed a substitute.”

“We already have a substitute – we had him ready at the same time as Commander Harcourt. It’s better to double up on these important jobs. The substitute actually left England the day before Harcourt. I picked up his report at Dover this morning. It crossed a few hours ahead of him. But he’ll be in England now.” Mr. Fortescue looked at his watch. “Indeed, he’ll be on his way to London. I don’t know a lot about dogs, but it seems to me that if you don’t open either the door or the window, Rasselas will attempt to break out of his own accord.”

“Rasselas!” said Mr. Behrens in his sternest voice, but the dog took not the slightest notice. The deerhound turned to Mr. Fortescue, exactly as if he were appealing to someone with more sense.

Mr. Fortescue raised the latch of the window, swung it open, and Rasselas went through it in one smooth golden arc, raced down the front drive like a driven duststorm, and threw himself at the stocky figure standing in the gateway.

“It would appear,” said Mr. Fortescue, “that our substitute has got here a little quicker than I thought he would. I hope the dog doesn’t kill him in his enthusiasm. A written report is one thing. A verbal report will be even more enlightening.”

It was some hours later, after Mr. Fortescue had departed for London, that Mr. Behrens got round to saying, “But why?”

Mr. Calder, looking a little thinner, but remarkably brown and fit, leaned back in his chair, scratched the dome of Rasselas’ head and said, “It was very difficult – very difficult, indeed. We found out – but a lot too late – that Harcourt had sold out.”

“Commander Harcourt?” Mr. Behrens thought of the dark, clever, determined face. It seemed impossible, though not so impossible as some of the things that had happened in the past twenty years. Then as Mr. Behrens thought about it, a lot of facts fell into place.

“They got at him through his Greek relatives. He’s been their man since the war. God knows what damage he did before we got on to him.”

“And he was in Operation Prometheus from the start!”

“From the start. He knew it all – every detail. So we had only two options. Either drop the whole thing or try a sort of triple bluff. If I were groomed for the job, you see, and then went off my head, Harcourt became the obvious and natural substitute. Of course he had to say yes, meaning to make contact with his own friends just as soon as he got ashore in Albania. But Mikalos has plenty of friends, too. They got him first. Meanwhile, I’d landed fifty miles down the coast. I suppose I was about the last person the opposition expected to see, so I had quite an easy run. And a very interesting talk with Mikalos. Prometheus is more than a little tired of having his liver pecked out by the eagle. We may be seeing some action in that part of the world quite soon.”

“I wish you’d told me!” said Mr. Behrens.

“I wanted to. Fortescue wouldn’t hear of it. And I’m afraid he was right.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think back to that time in Surrey Street. If Rasselas hadn’t intervened, Harcourt was going to take a shot at me, wasn’t he? If you had known what you know now, would you have behaved exactly as you did?”

“I suppose that’s right,” said Mr. Behrens. “So you and Fortescue were the only people in the know.”

“Certainly not,” said Mr. Calder. “Rasselas knew
all
about it.”

Mr. Calder was silent, solitary and generous with everything, from a basket of cherries or mushrooms to efficient first aid to a child who had tumbled. The children liked him. But their admiration was reserved for his deerhound.

Rasselas had been born in the sunlight, His coat was the colour of dry sherry, his nose was blue-black and his eyes shone like worked amber. From the neat tufts at his heels to the top of his dome-shaped head, there was a royalty about him. He had lived in courts and consorted on his own terms with other princes.

Mr. Calder’s cottage stood at the top of a fold in the Kentish Downs. The road curled up to it from Lamperdown, in the valley. First it climbed slowly between woods, then forked sharply left and rose steeply, coming out onto the plateau, rounded and clear as a bald pate. The road served only the cottage, and stopped in front of its gate.

Beyond the house, there were paths which led through the home fields and into the woods beyond, woods full of primroses, bluebells, pheasant’s eggs, chestnuts, hollow trees and ghosts. The woods did not belong to Mr. Calder. They belonged, in theory, to a syndicate of businessmen from the Medway towns who came at the weekends, in autumn and winter, to kill birds. When the sound of their station wagons announced their arrival, Mr. Calder would call Rasselas indoors. At all other times, the great dog roamed freely in the garden and in the three open fields which formed Mr. Calder’s domain. But he never went out of sight of the house, nor beyond the sound of his master’s voice.

The children said that the dog talked to the man, and this was perhaps not far from the truth. Before Mr. Calder came, the cottage had been inhabited by a bad-tempered oaf who had looked on himself as custodian for the Medway sports men, and had chased and harried the children who, in their turn, had become adept at avoiding him.

When Mr. Calder first came, they had spent a little time in trying him, before finding him harmless. Nor had it taken them long to find out something else. No one could cross the plateau unobserved, small though he might be and quietly though he might move. A pair of sensitive ears would have heard, a pair of amber eyes would have seen; and Rasselas would pad in at the open door and look enquiringly at Mr. Calder who would say, “Yes, it’s the Lightfoot boys and their sister. I saw them, too.” And Rasselas would stalk out and lie down again in his favorite day bed, on the sheltered side of the woodpile.

Apart from the children, visitors to the cottage were a rarity. The postman wheeled his bicycle up the hill once a day; delivery vans appeared at their appointed times; the fish man on Tuesdays, the grocer on Thursdays, the butcher on Fridays. In the summer, occasional hikers wandered past, unaware that their approach, their passing and their withdrawal had all been reported to the owner of the cottage.

Mr. Calder’s only regular visitor was Mr. Behrens, the retired schoolmaster who lived in the neck of the valley, two hundred yards outside Lamperdown Village, in a house which had once been the Rectory. Mr. Behrens kept bees, and lived with his aunt. His forward-stooping head, his wrinkled brown skin, blinking eyes and cross expression made him look like a tortoise which has been roused untimely from its winter sleep.

Once or twice a week, summer and winter, Mr. Behrens would get out his curious tweed hat and his iron-tipped walking stick, and would go tip-tapping up the hill to have tea with Mr. Calder. The dog knew and tolerated Mr. Behrens, who would scratch his ears and say, “Rasselas. Silly name.
You
came from Persia, not Abyssinia.” It was believed that the two old gentlemen played backgammon.

There were other peculiarities about Mr. Calder’s ménage which were not quite so very apparent to the casual onlooker.

When he first took over the house, some of the alterations he had asked for had caused Mr. Benskin, the builder, to scratch his head. Why, for instance, had he wanted one perfectly good southern-facing window filled in, and two more opened on the north side of the house?

Mr. Calder had been vague. He said that he liked an all-round view and plenty of fresh air. In which case, asked Mr. Benskin, why had he insisted on heavy shutters on all downstairs windows and a steel plate behind the woodwork of the front and back doors?

There had also been the curious matter of the telephone line. When Mr. Calder had mentioned that he was having the telephone installed, Mr. Benskin had laughed. The post office, overwhelmed as they were with post-war work, were hardly likely to carry their line of poles a full mile up the hill for one solitary cottage. But Mr. Benskin had been wrong, and on two counts. Not only had the post office installed a telephone with surprising promptness, but they had actually dug a trench and brought it in underground.

When this was reported to him, Mr. Benskin had told the public ear of the Golden Lion that he had always known there was something odd about Mr. Calder.

“He’s an inventor,” he said. “To my mind, there’s no doubt that’s what he is. An inventor. He’s got government support. Otherwise, how’d he get a telephone line laid like that?”

Had Mr. Benskin been able to observe Mr. Calder getting out of bed in the morning, he would have been fortified in his opinion. For it is a well-known fact that inventors are odd, and Mr. Calder’s routine on rising was very odd indeed.

Summer and winter, he would wake half an hour before dawn. He turned on no electric light. Instead, armed with a big torch, he would pad downstairs, the cold nose of Rasselas a few inches behind him, and make a minute inspection of the three ground-floor rooms. On the edges of the shutters were certain tiny threadlike wires, almost invisible to the naked eye. When he had satisfied himself that these were in order, Mr. Calder would return upstairs and get dressed.

By this time, day was coming up. The darkness had withdrawn across the bare meadows and chased the ghosts back into the surrounding woods. Mr. Calder would take a pair of heavy naval binoculars from his dressing table, and, sitting back from the window, would study with care the edges of his domain. Nothing escaped his attention: a wattle hurdle blocking a path; a bent sapling at the edge of the glade; a scut of fresh earth in the hedge. The inspection was repeated from the window on the opposite side.