When I got home–after some cautious reconnaissance to ensure that nobody was interested in the time I returned –I was horrified to notice how drawn and weary my Cecily looked. She must have had that worry upon her face for a couple of weeks, and I hadn’t noticed it. It would be truer to say that I hadn’t wished to notice it. I had a wild romp with Jerry and George, and was told off by her in the normal way for exciting them before they went to bed. There was a note of relief in her half-angry protest. The house seemed to have returned to its accustomed casual happiness.
“Your friend has a nice voice,” she said to me when we were alone, “but he shouldn’t pretend to be English.”
“Good Lord, he could pass anywhere!”
“Not with women. He’s too gallant.”
“On the telephone?”
“He told me what I looked like from the way I spoke.”
“And do you?”
“I hope so,” she laughed.
Then she started to talk of our friends, flitting inconsequently from one to another. It was that sort of monologue to which a husband can go on answering hm and ah so long as he takes care to look intelligent and interested. What did I think of this one and that? And their wives? And their daughters? I tried not to show that most of them bored me, for that might have reflected upon Cecily’s ability to make them interesting–and small blame to her, for even their Maker had failed! It was only after half an hour of this that I spotted she was trying to find out–from my enthusiasm or studied carelessness–whether I wasn’t running some clandestine affair under cover of the pretended building racket.
I kept this brilliant discovery to myself, for I didn’t want to hurt her pride. If a woman has pride and joy, you cannot help loving her. I suppose they all know that, and rather wish they didn’t.
In the morning–much to her annoyance on a Sunday– I had business between nine and ten. I called on Sandorski, and found him in a turtle-neck sweater glowing with foxy health, after, no doubt, some crazily strenuous daily dozen and a hearty lunatic’s breakfast. His host, the doctor, having been on night duty, was asleep.
“My shoot,” I told him, “is a landing ground. They mean to put movable radio beacons at both ends of the strip. When you shot that friend of yours he was arranging an emplacement for the southern beacon. The strip has not yet been used, but it’s going to be. It’s high ground clear of obstructions, remote, level, and the landowner is in this up to the neck.”
“It won’t be used,” he answered, “because they know somebody found them out.”
“Nobody found them out. They have been wondering whether I mightn’t be guilty. If it wasn’t me, it could be a poacher.”
I decided to trust him. It was pointless to go on mystifying a wholehearted ally who had hidden little or nothing from me. I told him how the accident really happened. He guffawed at my words of regret.
“Lord!” he yelled. “I once did the same thing to my uncle! Lord! We both had our breakfast off the mantelpiece for a week!”
Then he bounced about like a little boy with an urgent need, shouting:
“Air pistol! Air pistol! Air pistol!”
“Mean anything to you?”
“Riemann! That’s the man you shot. Colonel, my lad! If Riemann has had it, you’ve done me a favor. Now, whom was he with?”
“Your Colonel Hiart,” I replied, “if it’s the same colonel you knew. Tall, thin, sunburnt, dark. Very sensitive and intelligent face. Can stand still indefinitely, which most people can’t. And likely to know that Peter Sandorski was after his companion.”
“That’s him! No soldier–never was! But knows everything! Guesses what I’m working on. Guesses I might catch up with Riemann any day. General of Cavalry–that would frighten him, ha? Second sight, but a bloody pansy–” and he went into details.
“But you grant him a flair?”
“Cleverest man in Europe, when he isn’t too scared to think.”
“Right! Now, suppose he went over the ground in daylight, there must have been plenty of evidence for a trained eye. I don’t believe I ever picked up the empty cartridge. And when he’d pulled himself together, he might remember the difference of sound between a gun and a rifle. Damn it, he’s a soldier, and he must have heard plenty of both, even if he doesn’t like ‘em! And wouldn’t he check up where you were at the time? It’s a fair old puzzle, but he ought to know the death or disappearance of Riemann had nothing to do with the airstrip.”
“Hiart, ha?” he answered, as if the man’s reactions were not to be judged by ordinary standards. “You or a poacher at eighty yards? It might occur to him. But he wouldn’t rule out straight revenge on Riemann. And I don’t think they’ll use the airstrip.”
“Then why have they put back the supports for the beacon?”
“How do you know they ever took ‘em away?”
“Because they’d have taken a horrid risk if they didn’t and because I’ve seen the four holes where the spikes were before. That’s what Pink and your S.S. man were doing just before they nearly caught me–pulling up the supports and hiding them somewhere.”
He snorted agreement.
“Who’s employing Hiart?” he asked.
I gave him a picture of Heyne-Hassingham and a lecture on the People’s Union, bringing in the earnest statistician as an example. It all fitted–an organization at bottom hysterical, but in practice efficient, impudent and with an appeal to the ruthless idealist.
“The rest, during the week, is up to you, General,” I said, “because I have to earn my living. What we want to know is when those beacons go into position. And I’ll tell you what time to watch. Not in daylight because there are too many people about. Not at night because they won’t want to show a lot of artificial light. But at dusk, after the farm laborers have gone home. And I think they’ll also want to be sure that I am in my office and not taking an afternoon off.”
“And what then?”
“We go to the police, I suppose.”
“Any evidence?”
“The beacons.”
“Colonel, my lad,” he smiled, “just work it out! What will the police do? Send up a couple of constables to check your story. Somebody will see ‘em or hear ‘em, and that’s the end of the airstrip.
“What’s the next move, ha? Anonymous information to the police that Colonel Taine may be using his shoot as a little private Garden of Remembrance. With all the details. You try and deny ‘em. Especially if they say you bumped him off on the nineteenth, when the motorcycle was found, not the eighteenth. Where’s your alibi? What’s your story? People’s Union? You must be a political maniac. Heyne-Hassingham and Hiart? Above suspicion! Where did you put that body, by the way?”
“Where it will take a lot of finding,” I answered sulkily.
“Think so? I’ve had some experience. So has Scotland Yard. I’ll tell you the alternatives. Under the manure heap in the barn. In the middle of a bush–but unless you were in a tearing hurry, we’ll rule that out. Any heap of stones. Or the pit where the dead sheep are. Ha? Ha, pokerface? Now, you leave it all to me.”
Sandorski pointed out that for a job of this kind–and he said he had organized enough of them to know–an aircraft had to have a fairly respectable base and a reason for leaving it. Therefore it would take off in daylight. Therefore it would arrive before midnight. And if it were going to land within five hundred yards of a road, the organizers must be sure of a dark night with no moon. That gave Wednesday, Thursday or Friday as the most likely dates. He didn’t think they would risk leaving the beacons in position; they would bring them out to the field on the night the plane was expected. I was just, he repeated, to leave it to him.
I did so, with some misgivings on the Polish Cavalry’s conception of intelligence work. Colonel Hiart, with his extreme caution, seemed a more desirable model. We agreed that Sandorski would telephone me at my home if the beacons were put up, and that I would join him within an hour at the haystacks above Blossom’s farmhouse–a rendezvous which both of use felt certain we could reach in darkness without being observed. Just in case they had a man to spare for watching my door, I said I would go out at the back and walk across the hills to the shoot.