“I’d find it unnecessary too,” I retorted, “if I still had army rations. But I must admit I enjoy it. I’ll also admit that I think I ought not to.”
That was a perfectly sincere remark; I wasn’t acting. Afterwards, when I knew a little more of Hiart, I saw that I couldn’t have answered better. He had intended deliberately to provoke some reaction, probably brutal, which would give him a line on my character. I wouldn’t like to say what he made of the reaction that in fact he got, but he must have thought it unlikely that I was a man to shoot strangers and remove their bodies.
When the car had driven away and Blossom had returned to his hay carting, I started to tramp through the roots for partridge. It was merely to put up a show of activity. The coveys were far too wild at the end of October to be walked up.
I was perplexed, and in the blackest depression. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt that Heyne-Hassingham and his tame colonel had come over to Blossom’s farm on a Saturday afternoon in the hope of finding me, that they considered me a possible suspect, or, alternatively, a possible ally. All the tripe Heyne-Hassingham had talked about my grandfather’s friendship for his family seemed to indicate that he wanted my own.
Ally in what? That I couldn’t answer. I was shocked and alarmed to discover that Heyne-Hassingham, prominent, patriotic and above suspicion, was connected with the runaway Hiart, with the violence of that nocturnal attempt on me, with a motorcycle so compromising that it had to be left abandoned and unclaimed.
I pulled myself together by remembering that only a week before I had expected every hour to be hauled in by the police for questioning. Well, that hadn’t happened and seemed unlikely to happen, but I began to think I would prefer the police to this fog of uncertainty. I didn’t know whom to protect myself against. I even wondered whether I had interfered by my mysterious, unaccountable shot with some private action of the Intelligence Services. That, if it were so, made my guilt a thousand times worse.
When I got home, there was further evidence that somebody was interested in my movements.
“Have you got a cigarette case that doesn’t belong to you?” Cecily asked.
“No. Why?”
She said that a man had called up and wanted to know if I had found his case. She replied that I hadn’t told her anything, and asked him where he had lost it. When he dined with me the week before last, he said, and added:
“Let’s see. When was that?”
Now, this is a cautionary story for children on the virtue of never having secrets from one’s wife. Cecily knew perfectly well that if I dined with anyone at all, I should have come home full of it.
“Wednesday, of course,” he said.
That disastrous Wednesday, October 19th, when I had ostensibly been in Salisbury, was the only day I could have dined out. Any other wife, piqued at the fact that my doings had been exceptional and puzzling, would have eagerly swallowed the bait; but Cecily smelled something wrong with it.
“No,” she had answered instinctively. “The only night he was out was Saturday.”
She saw the relief in my face. It may be that she even heard a gasp of tension freed. By sheer good sense she had ruled me out as a possible suspect.
“Darling,” she asked anxiously, “you haven’t… ?”
“Yes? What?”
“Well, done anything against the law. But it’s impossible.”
I avoided the direct answer.
“He was trying to find out if I came home late that night,” I said.
I told her, on the spur of the moment and very unconvincingly, that I was investigating a racket in building materials for my firm, and trying to get evidence that the police could not. She accepted it, but she knew very well that I would have told her that much long before, even if I didn’t give the details. And she knew that I knew. There was nothing whatever hidden from either of us, except a bit of prosaic fact.
Cecily went upstairs to put the children to bed, and I gave myself a stiff gin. It did so much good that I had two more. The evening story turned out to be rather more imaginative than usual.
I was always allowed a wild twenty minutes with the children after their bath and before they were finally tucked up. This period was spent in some romp or other–suppressed by Cecily if it promised to be too exciting for sleep –or in stories. My two sons, Jerry aged seven and George aged five, had a taste, which I tried to satisfy, for improbabilities. Not fairies, but something near the shaggy dog story was what they liked. That night I started one about a nest of ants in the garden. When petrol was poured down the hole to destroy them, out they all came, saying thank-you-very-much and driving a communal car.
Cecily listened to the end of the story, and then we had supper in rather less silence than had been the custom for the last ten days. I warned her that if anyone seemed anxious to find out where I had been after dusk on the eighteenth and up to midnight on the nineteenth, she was to remember that I had been at home. And–as these people seemed clever at misusing the telephone–I suggested a code for our personal service. If I myself were on the telephone and I carried on with the ant story for the children, it meant that I was on this secret job and she must be wary. Anyone purporting to give her a message from me would also mention ants.
It was no good to worry, no good to break in any way from my routine. Routine is a powerful drug, helping a sufferer to live on condition that he accepts a slightly deadened existence. So I worked hard and regularly during the week, and took my Saturday afternoon as usual on the shoot. It was the fifth of November, two and a half weeks from the death of the unknown.
The warren was still undisturbed. So, apparently, were my nerves, for I shot a hare almost on the edge of the pit. Then I walked back the length of the down, getting nothing at all on the way, towards the stacks and richer fields at the southern end of the farm.
I was just turning into the track which led past the barn and down to the valley, when, some way ahead of me and on the other side of a gate, I saw a small, tweedy, sporty-looking man earnestly watching the long grass in front of him.
“Hi, you!” he shouted. “Stay just where you are!”
“Why?”
“Wait and see!”
He accompanied this order with a cheerful wave of his stick, and made gestures with his free hand in the direction of the field. He doubled round the angle of the hedge and disappeared.
His commanding voice had sounded thoroughly friendly, so I obeyed. Then I saw him crash through one of Blossom’s neatest fences, as if he had had a horse between his legs, and up got the partridges. He was astonishingly right in his judgment. They skimmed across my front into the turnips, and I got a quick right and left which must have looked quite showy from where he was standing.
“Thank you” I said when he came up. “How on earth did you know what they’d do on strange ground?”
“Brought up with ‘em,” he answered. “Liked ‘em for breakfast. One for me, brace for Father.”
He was a fiery-looking little bouncer, about five and a half feet high with a pointed face and a thin sandy mustache. There was a network of scars on one side of his chin, and he had a slight limp which suggested still another war wound. His age was unguessable–somewhere between forty and fifty-five. Whatever it was, he was undoubtedly fighting fit, and his movements were fast and jerky as those of a well-strung puppet.
We had a short conversation–one of those curious interchanges wherein nothing whatever is revealed but instant mutual sympathy. I found myself saying:
“I can’t offer you much sport, but if It would amuse you to join me up here any week end, I’d be delighted.”
It was a wildly impulsive offer, especially as I had every reason to be suspicious of strangers. But he was so obviously a man from whom I could learn.