Operation Pax (4 page)

Routh stared at him. ‘What d’you mean – what about it?’

‘What I mean is quite simple. Get down.’

‘Get down?’

‘Certainly. But perhaps you don’t believe that you are the lamb? I assure you that you are. The newest and most innocent of my lambs.’ Squire smiled – an odd, sweet smile that made Routh shudder. ‘
Lie down
.’

Routh looked from Deilos to Squire – from the unnatural animal to the unnatural man – and was by no means sure which was the more alarming. Was this mad freak before the tamed lion merely a whim or a cruel joke by the way? Was it, in fact, a sudden and almost meaningless fancy prompted by Squire’s knowledge of his victim’s earlier humiliation that day? Or was this sort of thing going to go on, and was the lion simply the first exhibit in a leisured sadistic joke?

Long before he had ceased confusedly asking himself these questions Routh found that he had in fact cast himself on the ground beside Deilos. The brute on this near acquaintance was rather smelly, but took not the slightest notice of him. Squire was looking down at them with his horrible smile. ‘You must understand,’ he said, ‘that I am a magician. If I say “Abracadabra” Deilos will take no notice of you. But if I say “Abracadabra” backwards, he will at once change his nature and eat you. Wouldn’t you like to be able to change the nature of a living creature at a word?’

Routh made no reply. He felt frightened and ridiculous, but still his cunning didn’t cease to work. It worked the more desperately, the more he hated his tormentor. And by now he hated him very much.

Squire’s smile vanished. He took a quick, almost furtive glance around him. He stepped forward and kicked Deilos hard on the rump – whereupon Deilos got to his feet with a yelp and padded away. Routh, without waiting to be kicked in his turn, scrambled to his feet. Squire brought out a handkerchief and dabbed his forehead. ‘We must get on,’ he said abruptly – and he strode forward. They passed out of the lion’s paddock and moved downhill, through a stretch of sombre woodland. Presently, beyond a lighter screen of larches, the variously pitched roofs of a large and rambling house became visible.

Routh considered the simple proposition that his companion was insane. It was certainly the easiest way of explaining him. And Squire, if mad, must now be considered as harmlessly mad. For they were at length almost within a stone’s throw of a house that must surely be too populous to admit even of a wealthy owner’s engaging in vagaries of a markedly violent or criminal kind. On the other hand Squire had already behaved so strangely and unwarrantably to Routh that there was no likelihood of any further trouble being made about the affair with his employee in the lane. Whoever was more or less in charge of Squire would have to hush all that up. Otherwise there would be a row. For some seconds Routh gave himself up to the elaboration of a pleasantly novel fantasy. It would be high-class Sunday paper stuff. Out of the Lion’s Mouth. The Frank Story of My Two Ordeals. Exclusive. By Alfred Routh.

The glowing picture faded. It wouldn’t really do. For once the police had a grip on him they would uncover a dozen of the three-ten swindles while having him on remand. Still, the fact remained that if Squire were no more than a bit of a lunatic at large he, Routh, was invulnerable. There was so much of relief in this reading of his situation that Routh for some moments inclined to it violently. But if it ministered to the ease of his cowardice it correspondingly thwarted his cunning. There could be very little in it. A bit of bluster before a relative or a doctor, and he might get away with a five or ten pound note. There were far greater possibilities in the idea that Squire was involved in crime or racket in a big way, and that his keeping a pet like Deilos and using him to scare recruits was no more than a streak of casual nastiness such as a master criminal might very properly allow himself.

Or perhaps the suggestion of madness was a sort of blind. For Routh an interpretation of human conduct was always the more plausible if it embodied a large element of deception and fraud. With these ideals he was at home, whereas the notion of irresponsible madness was alarming and disagreeable to him. This being so, he had not gone another fifty yards before entrenching himself firmly in his first conviction. There was something very deep in the situation with which he had involuntarily become involved. And out of its depths Routh with all his wits about him might conceivably fish what, for him, would be fabulous wealth. He was proceeding to entertain himself with some details of this beatific vision when he and his conductor rounded the larch spinney and came full upon the house.

He had often enough seen such places from the road, but never before had he come so close up to one as this.

Squire’s house – if it was indeed his – was very large, and Routh knew that it had grown up over the centuries. The chief architectural feature of the side at which he was directly looking was an affair of high Corinthian pillars running up past three storeys of windows to a blank entablature and pediment. All this, he saw, was not of stone but of some stuff that needs to be painted. It was, in fact, painted dead white, giving an impression that Routh was supposed to be American. But to the left of this was warm red brick enclosing mullioned windows and rising to a succession of gable-ends behind which stood tall Tudor chimneys. Beyond this again, and running off at an angle, was a wing that had at some date been heavily Gothicized, and that now lurked behind meaningless buttresses and groaned beneath improbable battlements. These vagaries accounted for about half the building, the rest of which was a solid Georgian.

Routh’s awareness of all this was intuitive rather than technical. The effect, as of several houses backing awkwardly into each other, was for a moment as disturbing to him as some horror glimpsed in a doctor’s medical journal in a railway carriage, a monstrous birth of twins or triplets fantastically conjoined. But he told himself that once more he was unprofitably fancying things. All the more tangible suggestions that the condition of the place evoked were of prosperity, serenity and cheerfulness.

Well-kept lawns and gravel walks, tall dark hedges trimmed to severe perpendiculars, a few broad beds of massed chrysanthemums: these seemed to speak of a taste in gardens that was mature and good. There was a wide shallow terrace now steeped in sunshine and serving as a promenade for half a dozen miniature poodles of expensive appearance and extravagant clip. Several French windows were thrown open to the air, and gave upon expanses of turf or paving so lavishly equipped with garden furniture of the elaborated modern sort, that the effect was of handsomely equipped drawing-rooms tumbling out of doors to breathe. Nor was the placid scene without its congruous humanity. A five-year-old boy, sturdy and flaxen-haired, was playing with the poodles. And on a lawn directly below Routh and Squire a company of ladies and gentlemen were enjoying a game of croquet.

A variety of impulses jostled in Routh. Here were half a dozen demonstrably sane persons, engaging in one of the mildest of civilized pleasures. Would it not be best to seize the chance of rushing forward, throwing himself upon their mercy, and claiming their protection from the abominable Squire? For whatever was the truth about Squire he was certainly dangerous, and the shadowy possibilities of financial exploitation which he represented lurked amid hazards quite out of Routh’s common line.

But even as Routh debated with himself this course of action, he became aware of a further bewilderment in his situation. The croquet players puzzled and alarmed him quite as much as Squire did. The sharp
clop
…
clop
…
clop
of wood upon wood as a military-looking man with a grey moustache achieved a brisk break was obscurely frightening. If Squire was patently sinister and his house indefinably so, then this spectacle was like a calculated effect designed to enhance the fact. The croquet players were disturbingly enigmatical. Routh didn’t trust them. After all, in an environment which made the lion mild was it not very conceivable that a croquet player upon being appealed to for protection might simply swing his mallet and dash one’s brains out?

But on all this there was only a moment for reflection. Squire swung round a wing of the house and the croquet players disappeared.

Routh now lost his bearings. Continuing to skirt the main building, Squire led the way into a walled garden and out again, using a key each time. Beyond this lay a kitchen garden, empty except for a bent old man culling cauliflowers, and they passed on to a sort of narrow alley of which one side was formed by a high beech hedge and the other by a long, low building of modern appearance and indeterminate length.

Presenting to the world nothing but a succession of frosted glass windows, this building ran slightly downhill, so that the level dropped as by broad, shallow steps. And presently Routh caught a glimpse of its other end. It had been run out from the house as far as it could go – to the margin, in fact, of a small lake. In the middle of the lake was an island, seemingly entirely occupied by a large, blank and improbable temple. Although such fantasies were unfamiliar to Routh, he guessed at once that there was nothing out of the way in it. Much odder was the fact that this ancient absurdity was now directly linked to the new raw wing he had been skirting by a wooden bridge – a bridge lightly constructed but entirely enclosed, so that it was, in fact, a species of tunnel, relieved only by a few small windows.

But all this Routh only glimpsed. For Squire had stopped before a door near the end of the building, unlocked and opened it, and pushed Routh unceremoniously inside. He locked the door from within, while Routh took stock of a long, bleak corridor.

‘Well, here we are.’

In Squire’s voice Routh again caught a momentary note of uncertainty. He derived what comfort he could from it in a situation that he increasingly disliked. His isolation with the alarming Squire appeared to be complete. There was not a sign of life down the length of this narrow corridor. There was not a sound from the succession of rooms they were now passing. A modern monastery must be like this – the kind in which you take vows to keep your mouth shut. The unlikely comparison, floating through Routh’s mind, increased his uneasiness, for there is a whole popular mythology of the hidden horrors of the cloister. Forty Months in a Flagellant Order. By the Author of A Short History of Torture (Illustrated). Momentarily overborne by these new imaginings, Routh looked about him in the expectation of seeing walls hung with scourges and a floor dripping blood. But the walls were pervasively blank, and on the floor of the long corridor was nothing more remarkable than a thick, green rubber that deadened every sound.

‘And you can wait here.’

Squire was unlocking and opening a door. Routh looked at him warily. ‘What d’you mean – wait here?’ he demanded.

‘There’ll be an interview.’

The words were perfunctory, and Routh sensed that they were quite meaningless. He made to back away. Squire grabbed him, swung him effortlessly off his feet, and pitched him through the doorway.

‘An interview with my colleagues, my dear fellow, quite soon. Did I say we were magicians? Alchemists would be a better description. You will no doubt make yourself as comfortable as you can.’

Routh picked himself up in time to see the door closing and to hear a key turn in its lock. It was his first confused impression that he was in a small kitchen, but in a moment he realized that it was a laboratory. He recognized it – as even the most ignorant can now recognize virtually any material creation of man – from the cinema. There was a bench, a sink, an affair with various gas burners and a small flue above. There were rows of bottles behind sliding glass doors. The only movable furniture was a high wooden stool. The room was lit through a large, barred skylight.

Routh surveyed the unfamiliar place.
Alchemy
. That was what Squire had said – that he and whatever confederates he had were alchemists. It meant chemists, scientists. A sense of vast illumination came to Routh. Now he understood.

He had puzzled and puzzled over the racket that could sustain a place like this. There had been a time – he believed – at which a really big operator on the black market could have lived like this if he had wanted to. But nowadays that line of country was said to be not nearly so good. No! Routh knew what he had found. He had found the people who forge the fivers.

Like Galileo in the dungeons of the Inquisition, resistlessly imagining the majestic pageant of the planets circling round their sun, Routh crouched in his odd prison and stared out, round-eyed, at the brave new world of his discovery. Not Cortez on his peak could have been more exultant. For in that criminal world upon the inglorious fringes of which Routh habitually moved no current conviction is more compelling than this: that every authentic five-pound note has its identical twin, the creation of forgers so scientifically skilful that all the answering science of the Royal Mint, the Bank of England, and other institutions and persons unspeakably august, is powerless to crush the racket. As far as five-pound notes go, there is twice as much paper money in England as there ought to be.

Routh leapt down from his stool. He, who had only that morning failed in the prosecution of a familiar seventy-shilling swindle, now brushed greatness. Not far away was a man who – although he had indeed knocked Routh senseless, obliged him to grovel in the dust beside a tame lion, and incarcerated him in an unattractive laboratory – was in all probability at the very head of Routh’s profession. His instinct had been vindicated. Let him now but behave with sufficient ruthlessness and guile, and he might leave his baser self behind him forever. All his frustrations, all his baffled hopes and cheated appetites were stirring. Those impulses which had led him into his inglorious exploit in the lane roused themselves again and roused themselves far more effectively, since they were now bent upon a design far more potent in its appeal.