That was a wonderful chance to study his reactions. I shot the rabbit dead, and had the satisfaction of seeing him jump and drop his glasses. He didn’t make any instinctive leap for cover, however, so it was reasonably clear he had heard nothing of any acts of violence in the neighborhood.
“By Jove!” I exclaimed. “I’m sorry! I didn’t see you.”
I picked up the rabbit, and smiled at him with what I hoped was an expression of innocence and concern.
“This is intolerable,” he complained. “Intolerable! Careless brutality! Have you no thought at all of the suffering you cause to harmless creatures?”
His voice was like the whine of a bagpipe, and his little feet danced to it with indignation.
“We all must eat.” I said.
“Have you not enough to eat with what the government allows you? A carefully balanced diet approved by all the statisticians? Killing for food should be left to those who can distribute economically, and understand it.”
“At least I understand it,” I replied with a grin, swinging the rabbit at him. “He didn’t suffer at all.”
“Improper!” he squalled.
“Is your objection on religious grounds?”
“Certainly not. I have no religion. My objection is that these sports of the rich, these remnants of feudalism, are antisocial.”
“But I’m not rich.”
“Then if you are not, you should set an example.”
He was a lovely little man. I didn’t want to lose him till he had told me everything he knew; so I apologized, and asked to be shown the light. He recommended several pamphlets which, I gathered, pleaded for the trap as more humane than the gun. I promised to read them. Then I asked him if he were on holiday.
“As much as I allow myself,” he replied. “I am studying the collection of essential statistics for a backward rural area
“Splendid! Who for?”
“The Workers’ Improvement Society.”
“A labor organization?”
“Certainly not! It is one of the extraparliamentary activities of the People’s Union.”
You had only to see him, to hear his limited little mind at talk, to know that he couldn’t be anything else but sincere. He was just the sort of chap who could be employed for any dirty trick with absolute confidence that he wouldn’t see it so long as he felt useful and important. I am sure I should have accepted him at face value if I hadn’t known better, and especially if I hadn’t known–for about an hour–that the People’s Union under Heyne-Hassingham was subtle and dangerous at home and abroad as the young Nazi or Communist parties.
“What are you checking up here?” I asked.
“Parallel movement, and the proportion of pedestrians and transport using a nonmetaled track in preference to a secondary road, and their reasons. I shall put down your own reason as the destruction of wild life.”
“Call it rodent control,” I answered. “What do you do with your statistics when you’ve got them?”
“A colleague of mine correlates them.”
“And anyone out for a country walk–how does he fit in?”
“I ask him firmly what he is doing,” he replied, “and explain my motives with official courtesy. If in fact he is going for a country walk, I make a note of his income bracket and description, and enter his name in the column Non-Economic Activities.”
“How long have you been at it?”
“Since October 19th.”
“Description of every person seen, ha?”
I had caught that confoundedha?from Sandorski.
“I am assured it is essential to avoid duplication.”
“Sounds as if you were being trained for the police,” I said.
He blushed, positively blushed. Blowed if I hadn’t penetrated the secret hopes that had been held out to him!
“The police are politically untrained and unreliable,” he spluttered.
It was enough. I couldn’t have kept a straight face any longer–though it was really a matter for tears that such a man could ask his silly questions and be treated with deference in our once merry England. I said good-by, renewed my apologies, and kept him under observation from a distance. I didn’t have to wait long. He marched down to the village, as importantly as the steep slope allowed.
Since listening to Sandorski I had made a pretty confident guess at what the value of my shoot was to the interested parties. Sandorski had talked quite casually of agents being flown in and out of England. The newspapers, too, often carried stories of smuggling by air, and of the difficulty of police and customs control. The down was no landing field, but there was a level strip a good third of a mile long, with a rough but well-drained surface. It was quite good enough for any aircraft with a low landing speed. I also remembered Heyne-Hassingham’s conversation with Blossom. Hadn’t he been very anxious to know that there were no sheep or cattle on the down?
It was dusk, the best time to see and not be seen. I didn’t dare to approach the angle of the hedge where the dead man had been busy with his spirit level and spiked supports. Lord knew what ingenious devices there might be to record the passage of anyone pottering about! I decided, however, that I might risk a look at the northern end of the supposed airstrip. The uninterrupted level passed diagonally across the shoot, and ended in that kaffir kraal of doomed bramble bushes from which Pink and his late thug had been coming when they surprised me.
I knew more or less where to search–where the longest possible level line from the fatal angle of the hedge intersected the southern edge of the brambles. That wasn’t so vague as it sounds, for the clumps, when you got among them, were widely separated, and there weren’t more than half a dozen on the likely line.
I found what I wanted, a bush with the interior hollowed out. The entrance was well hidden, and to be detected only by the trampled grass. A casual eye would have put the disturbance down to cows. There were plenty of them munching the short turf here on the safe side of the hedge, where they couldn’t get in the way of a whirling propeller.
Inside the bush was enough empty space for a man to kneel without getting thorns in his head or twigs down his collar. The light, which outside was fast fading, was a deep elephant gray, revealing neither outline nor perspective. I hadn’t a torch with me, so I lit match after match, placing the burnt ends carefully in my pocket. The hole had been cleaned up–so far as it was possible to clean a floor of indefinite vegetable debris–but I got my evidence: half an inch of insulated copper wire, a bit of thin broken glass that suggested a bulb or radio valve, four holes in the ground, and some filings and chips of bright metal that would have been indistinguishable in daylight, and twinkled like stars in the light of a match.
Then, pushing accidentally against the side of the hollow, I found still clearer and wholly unsuspected evidence. There was a little alcove or bay, stuffed up with dead bramble stalks. I parted them carefully and saw, driven into the ground and leveled, four supports, identical with those I had buried by the side of their owner in the rabbit warren, all ready for what they were to hold.
Now I had a picture and the beginning of a pattern; and immediately the dull weight upon my conscience vanished. Whether morally it should have done so, I doubt; for I was neither more nor less guilty than before of causing the death of a man. But from this moment on, crime assumed the amoral, inconsequent quality of a death that one has caused in war.