On my way home I felt, with a vague soldier’s instinct, that the clue to the action must be found in the lie of the land. Yet never was there a more innocent patch of geography. Before me, to the south, was a great semicircle of rolling country, ending in the coastal hills. The smooth hogback where I was gave no impression of height and rose so gradually that it was not conspicuous or in any way a landmark; it was merely the highest point, level, spacious and remote, in a green bowl of farms and villages.
A week passed and nothing happened. I could almost accept an unexpected ring at the doorbell with equanimity. At any rate I had no longer to force myself into unnatural calm. The weather was vile. There were two days of gale with torrents of rain, and then a thick fog came up from the Channel. This suited me well. I went on foot to the pit, not even risking a bicycle in case it should be seen and recognized, and created the appearance of a landslip which had dragged a thorn tree lose from its roots. Thereafter the spot was covered by enough earth and tangled vegetation to discourage man or dog.
The following Saturday afternoon I went out again with my gun, and came on old Blossom and one of his men carting hay from a stack in the southern meadows. He called me over when I shouted a good-afternoon, and on the other side of the cart I found his landlord, Robert Heyne-Hassingham. Blossom introduced me as the man who had taken his shooting, and Heyne-Hassingham at once turned on the charm.
He had plenty of it, part hereditary and part acquired as a practicing politician. He was an excellent landlord and a man of considerable influence in the county–indeed, in all the West of England. During the war he had been chosen, it was said, as the underground leader for a very wide area in the event of a successful German invasion.
After the war, however, he became a slightly comic figure to the average citizen, for he began to take politics as seriously as any ardent socialist. He founded the People’s Union which had a lot of publicity till the newspapers grew tired of it. It was a sort of Boy’s Brigade for grownups, full of Ideals, Service and Religion. Any religion would do. It appealed to disgruntled ex-servicemen, and was supposed to have a following among regular officers of the Army and Navy–a threat that we hadn’t known since Cromwell’s day. To the plain Englishman, however, who keeps his Ideals, Service and Religion packed away in the gun room, well-oiled and ready for use but emphatically out of reach of the children, the People’s Union was offensive. It had a somewhat fascist smell of hierarchy. It paid lip service to democracy, of course, but there was no doubt that if Heyne-Hassingham and his choirboys ever came to power –which no one thought remotely possible but themselves –Parliament would be even more of a rubber stamp than it is.
As I say, he turned on the charm, and naturally enough I was flattered and began to think–as one usually does on meeting an eminent public man in the flesh–that I had greatly misjudged him. He discussed gun and game, talked of old days when his father and the gamekeepers had brought up thousands of pheasants by hand, and asked me if I thought the pheasant was establishing itself successfully as a purely wild bird. I had no doubt that it was.
He knew his countryside, though I had the impression that he was entertaining me with what he had heard rather than what he had observed. That thin, rather ascetic face didn’t really belong to our wealth of slow life.
“Your grandfather was a great friend of our family, Colonel Taine,” he said.
“Mr. Taine,” I corrected him.
Inverted snobbery, I suppose. But it’s ridiculous for an ordinary businessman to go walking about as a colonel.
“I was only thinking,” he smiled, “how proud the old boy would have been of a grandson who commanded his battalion and collected all your gongs on the way.”
I didn’t believe that my grandfather had any connection with the Heyne-Hassinghams–except that he sold them a famous ram of his own breeding–but I accepted this lush suggestion of friendship. Grandfather, if he visited their house at all, would certainly have made some memorable inroads on the Heyne-Hassingham cellar before parting with his ram.
“The country needs men like you,” he said.
That was an invitation, but I wasn’t having any.
“We are a bit short of plain, contented chaps,” I answered.
“That is you?”
“It is.”
“You’re rare then, and you’re very lucky,” he said. “But, believe me, in too many other cases content grows into self-satisfaction.”
He asked us both to stroll as far as his car with him, playing the busy man who did not want to part from agreeable company but had to account for every minute of his time. His conversation was now mostly with Blossom, and about the high down. In answer to his questions Blossom, I remember, told him that the growth of grass had been disappointing that dry summer, and that he wasn’t putting any cattle or sheep on the down till the spring.
The car had been left on the upper road, so we passed that fatal angle of the boundary hedge. It was exactly as I and the dead man had left it, except that rain had cleared away the blood, if there ever was any, and restored the grass.
“By the way, Mr. Blossom,” Heyne-Hassingham asked, “have you agreed with your neighbor to leave that gap open, or is there a right of way?”
“Always bin open, and we keep ‘un open,” Blossom replied noncommittally.
Heyne-Hassingham asked if strangers ever wandered through that way, and was told they didn’t. Then his attention seemed to be drawn by the swarms of rabbits, and he wanted to know if Blossom sold the trapping. Blossom did. All game above ground was mine, but a professional trapper paid a useful sum for the right to take game below ground. He usually spent four or five nights after Christmas clearing out the big warrens.
Heyne-Hassingham kept on with his cross-examination. He stayed in character as an interested landlord, but was persistent as any lawyer.
“Is there any illicit trapping by local bad lads?” he asked.
“Not if Mr. Taine don’t. ‘E should learn, ‘e should! Bit o’ wire and f is old breeches, that’s all ‘e needs. Comes cheaper than bangin’ off fourpence!”
Blossom chuckled and puffed under his scarves and waistcoats, and gave me an enormous wink to assure me he wasn’t to be taken seriously.
“Up here often at night?” Heyne-Hassingham inquired, as if carrying on the joke.
“I? Never.”
This conversation made me uneasy. It might be innocent, but it was near enough to the bone to put me on my guard. And that was as well, for, when we came to the car, there was the handsome, nervous face which I had last seen staring, for a split second, at the dead companion in the bramble bush.
The man was leaning against Heyne-Hassingham’s car with a rather too conscious grace. He was in his early forties, lean, hard and able. I think that even then I spotted him as the type of staff officer whom one most dislikes but from whom one cannot withhold respect. Heyne-Hassingham introduced him as Colonel Hiart.
“This is Mr. Taine,” he said, “who rents the shooting up here.”
There was a hardly perceptible note of mischief in his voice as he gave me my civilian title. He guessed just what I was going to think of Hiart, and let me know–if I were clever enough to see it–that the contrast between us amused him. He was a subtle and likable creature. Natural enough, I suppose. If he hadn’t been, he could never have founded and held the devotion of his People’s Union.
Hiart shook hands. His narrow, dark eyes were laid on me as directly and expressionlessly as the guns of a tank.
“Do you shoot?” I asked him.
“I fear,” he said, “that I find it noisy and unnecessary.”