Strong Man

by H. R. F. Keating

  I was standing beside the map receiving instructions from Keig, which I would later divide up into orders to go to the different groups involved, when there came a sharp tap on the coloured glass-framed door that led to the rest of the house. I turned and recognized through the brownish glass of the door’s centre panel the primly tubby outline of Francis Crowe.

  ‘Yes,’ Keig called out, without looking up.

  Crowe came in. Even in the greeny light of the conservatory I could see at once that something had happened. Crowe’s normally rounded and even self-satisfied face looked almost haggard.

  ‘Mr Keig,’ he said with unusual over-formality, ‘I’ve been asked to make a report.’

  ‘You’ve been asked to do what?’ Keig inquired, with a touch of sheer incredulity.

  ‘Mr Keig. It’s about Quiddie.’

  ‘Quiddie’s over at Kermaddack,’ Keig said.

  Fred Quiddie was in charge of a group of something over fifty men in the vicinity of the small town of Kermaddack, responsible for the area immediately to the west of Lesneven. It was an important command, perhaps our most important of all, because not only did it mean pressing in as closely as possible to the capital itself but it was also exposed to the powerful thrusting raids of Calo and his troopers.

  Francis Crowe straightened his back and jutted out his plump hips in an effort to put things into their most strictly military perspective.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s one of Quiddie’s men from Kermaddack who brought the report in. Name of Innow.’

  ‘Innow? Innow?’ Keig said. ‘I know him, don’t I?’

  ‘He said he’d been recruited by us ourselves last summer, Mr Keig. But I don’t remember him.’

  ‘He’s thin,’ Keig said. ‘And older than most. A good forty, with not much flesh on his face, not much flesh on him at all. He was a shepherd. From the mountains.’

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘And what’s this report he’s brought? About Quiddie you said?’

  Surprisingly Francis Crowe did not answer. I took a pace forward and actually peered at him as if I was trying to read a distant small-print poster. And I saw the reason he was silent was simply that he could not bring himself to utter what he had to say next.

  ‘Speak up, man,’ Keig barked.

  ‘Mr Keig, Innow says that Quiddie has been slipping over to that place Rostrennan where they’re so against us and that he’s got a mistress there. And she’s the widow of one of the Keepers that Calo’s men shot, and it’s Rostrennan. If she told anyone there, they would put the Keepers on to him before you could say Jack Robinson. And—And none of us is perfect when they get to pulling out fingernails and there’s that red-hot poker thing, too. That’s all, Mr Keig.’

  It had all come out in one great rush. And I could see at once why poor Crowe had not wanted to say it, and why he had been thrust in by the others to break the bad news. Because it was bad news, as bad as could be. Crowe was perfectly right: Fred Quiddie, who had been with us from the beginning, who had worshipped Keig ever since that night in the sea when Keig had fished him into the safety of the captured launch after the Marshall Tear débâcle, Fred Quiddie who had grown in stature and independence like the rest of us in the eighteen months we had fought in the island, had allowed himself to commit an incredible folly. He had put himself in peril of being jerked from the arms of a woman by Keepers who could and would torture him into telling them how fifty of our men could be surrounded and wiped out. It was criminal, utterly criminal.

  ‘If Innow told you all this, why isn’t he in here now?’ Keig said sharply.

  Without a word Francis Crowe turned back to the door with its coloured border of stained glass, opened it and called through.

  ‘Mr Keig wants to see Innow.’

  A moment later Innow came in. Keig had remembered him pretty well. He was a lean person, lean in body, very lean in face with a peak of dark greying hair showing beneath his orangey-red woollen cap.

  He stood there a few feet inside the door looking straight in front of him with a set hard gaze.

  ‘Now then,’ Keig said sharply. ‘What’s this about Quiddie?’

  ‘What Crowe told you, Mr Keig.’

  ‘You saw it. You tell me.’

  Slowly Innow brought his deep-set eyes round to look at Keig.

  ‘I was on patrol,’ he said. ‘Guard patrol. Outside Kermaddack, over the Rostrennan way. I saw something moving and I went after it. It led me further than I meant to go, and then I saw it was only a dog and I started to hurry back. I’d been out of touch. That was when I saw him, and her.’

  ‘Who and who?’

  ‘Quiddie and the woman. The Keeper’s widow from Rostrennan.’

  ‘How did you know who she was?’

  ‘I knew her,’ Innow said with a sudden jet of fierceness. ‘I knew her, the lascivious bitch. I’d seen her when I’d been on watch over Rostrennan, seen the way she looked at the men.’

  ‘How did you know she was the Keeper’s widow?’ Keig thundered. ‘Answer when I ask.’

  Innow flinched.

  ‘I had a lad with me when I saw her,’ he said. ‘A lad as used to visit in Rostrennan before we took him on. He told me. Told me all about her too.’

  ‘Told you what about her?’

  ‘That she was no better than she ought to be.’

  ‘Just that? Was that all he told you? Just the words?’

  Again Innow could not meet Keig’s eyes.

  ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘He told me what she did.’

  ‘What did he tell you? What?’

  ‘She went with men. Before Calo’s troopers shot her husband and after.’

  ‘What men did she go with? Did the lad tell you that?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he did, Mr Keig. I forget the names but he told me ’em. Dozens of ’em.’

  ‘Dozens? There aren’t dozens of men in Rostrennan. You’re lying, man. Aren’t you? Lying.’

  ‘No. I swear not. I’m not. It maybe wasn’t dozens. But he did give me names. Daniel Qualtrough, that was one. And there were more. There were. There were truly half a dozen. Six men he named.’

  ‘And Quiddie? He was talking to her?’

  Innow’s lean body jerked forward from the hips.

  ‘He was doing more than talking,’ he said with savagery.

  Keig looked at him steadily.

  ‘Are you a married man, Innow?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Now Innow even darted me a glance, something like an appeal for help.

  ‘Why aren’t you married?’ Keig demanded again.

  Slowly Innow forced himself to look back.

  ‘Why should I tell you something like that?’ he said.

  ‘I asked.’

  There was a moment of utter silence. Then a tiny puff of air came in through a broken pane at the top of the conservatory and a hard flat tropical leaf tapped sharply against the ironwork supporting the roof.

  ‘Never had much use for women,’ Innow said grudgingly.

  ‘Ever been with one?’ Keig barked out.

  ‘No.’

  Innow’s narrow mouth twisted momentarily.

  ‘No, Mr Keig, I haven’t,’ he said. ‘But I know what being with a woman’s all about, and that was what Fred Quiddie was doing when I came upon him. That. He was getting up off her and laughing, he was. The slut.’

  ‘You can go,’ Keig said.

  It took a second or two for the words to penetrate the blaze of hatred that plainly fired all the man’s mind. Then he jerked to life, swung awkwardly round and, with shoulders going further back with every step, marched out of the green-shadowed conservatory.

  ‘Someone fetch Quiddie,’ Keig said when the door had closed.

  They were not pleasant hours, the two hours that went by before Fred Quiddie came. I sent the most reliable man we had, a wonderful stocky calm fellow called Steven Dowan, on a motorcycle we had captured from the Keepers, authorizing the use
of some of our small stock of precious-as-gold petrol.

  And I wished blackly that on the way back the pair of them would chance on a patrolling scout-car and that it would all end that way. Keig had sent me off to distribute the orders he had given me, but I sat instead in the little servant’s attic bedroom I slept in and dully let the time wash over me.

  And then, worse than waiting for Fred to come, Fred came.

  I had heard the sound of the motor-cycle perhaps a mile away in the quiet of the old-fashioned trafficless Oceanan afternoon, and I was down in the stableyard of the house waiting for him as he arrived. I think everyone else in our headquarters group was waiting nearby too, in some vague concealment or other—all except Keig.

  It was plain from the moment I set eyes on Fred that he knew what must have happened, for all that Dowan had been given the strictest instructions to say nothing and would have stuck to them no matter what. Fred’s slightly chubby perky face was set and pale and his eyes, which used to dart about like a sparrow’s looking for crumbs, were staring constantly straight ahead. I was reminded of the time he had heard Keig say we were not going to take our revenge for the bestial murder of the women of the Joughin family. But then his chirpy features had been wiped of all expression: now they were expressive enough, though expressive of a grimness I had never associated with Fred even in our grimmest moments.

  I stepped out to meet him.

  ‘Keig wants to see you,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Steve told me.’

  We went, the three of us, through the oddly deserted kitchens of the big house, along an echoing corridor and down to the door of the conservatory. I knocked on the browned-over glass.

  ‘Yes?’ came Keig’s voice.

  ‘It’s Quiddie,’ I said.

  ‘Bring him in.’

  We went in. Francis Crowe was there, in his hand another long radio message carefully copied out in neat capitals, doubtless Cormode regaling us with a new account of some exploit of Calo’s.

  ‘All right, Crowe, we’ll leave that a while,’ Keig said.

  I felt a little sense of shock: Keig did not drop things.

  He laid down the board that had been across his knees and looked at Fred now.

  ‘Quiddie,’ he said, ‘have you been love-making with a Keeper’s widow in Rostrennan?’

  Just that, the bare question. The key question.

  I could not bring myself to look at Fred. But I heard him. His voice came as a sort of croak, though it was clear he was making every effort to speak up.

  ‘Yes, Mr Keig. That’s true.’

  ‘You know you were risking the life of every man under you if you’d been taken by surprise by the Keepers?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Keig.’

  Keig looked away from him then. He turned slowly to the rest of us, myself, tubby mildly pompous Francis Crowe and decent honest reliable Steve Dowan.

  ‘You heard that?’ he said at last.

  We each murmured our yes.

  Keig stood up.

  ‘There’s only one thing I can do,’ he said.

  He looked round the green conservatory with the odd splotches of sunshine coming through the overlapping broad leaves to dapple the pale-tiled floor. I wondered what he wanted. Then he spoke again.

  ‘Quiddie, stand here.’

  He picked up the green-painted slatted chair he was accustomed to sit on and cleared a space in front of the stubbly old miniature palm-tree. Then he gravely walked away along the pallid-tiled central aisle of the conservatory for about five long paces.

  He swung round. Fred had gone over towards the palm, like a sonambulist I thought, had come up against the squat scaly trunk and had turned round. He looked at Keig now. His face was drained to a dead whiteness. His eyes stared unflinchingly through the green light.

  Keig’s right hand had dropped to his side and came up again holding his revolver. I heard the tiny click of the safety-catch being pushed over. Keig raised the gun till it was level with his eyes and took careful aim.

  There was only one shot. It boomed and echoed in the glass-walled conservatory like the sound of a cannon. Fred Quiddie’s head went smack back against the stubby trunk of the old palm. I saw for an instant the hole in his forehead, exactly between the eyes.

  Then he slumped over to his left side and lay crumpled on the pale neatly patterned tiles. He was perfectly still.

  3

  That short scene—it had all happened inside five minutes from the moment I had knocked on the browned-over glass of the conservatory door till the instant Fred Quiddie’s body tumbled sideways into that huddled still shape on the pale tiles—was hardly once absent from my mind for days, even for weeks, afterwards.

  I carried on with my work—we shifted our headquarters some eight or nine days later, and thankful I was—and the war against Mylchraine continued in ambush and counter-ambush, patrols and patrol-dodging and rapid neatly executed evacuation of our strong points when our intelligence network, which improved with every passing week, told us that the Keepers planned some strike in force. And I attended to my duties in it all, I think without slackening. But whenever my mind was not fully occupied I came back to that scene and the questions that lay behind it.

  Had Keig, I asked myself, now moved beyond the proper heights necessary to command into the borderlands of that region where men of power come to believe their lightest whim is law?

  Had he taken the irreversible step? Or was he at best almost committed to it? I tried to reason with myself that he was not. I polished in my mind like a talisman that curious moment years before when Keig and I had just succeeded in swimming our way free of the hunting Keepers and were hidden in that narrow sheltered dell on the shore of the Kernel. In answer to something Keig had said then I had, foolishly, parroted out Acton’s dictum about absolute power corrupting absolutely. And Keig had briefly questioned me about it, not with the hammering force he had now learnt to question with, but sharply enough. And, when he had satisfied himself on the facts, he had stated roughly but with unshakable certainty that the dictum was a mere half-truth. The statement had seemed then to come from the inner core of the man. But had it? Or had that inner core been unable to resist a rotting acid which had eaten into men with more training for the terrible responsibilities of power than Keig had even dreamt of?

  I thought of other instances where his decisions had hovered on either side of that border which divides a necessary toughness from a secretly loved harshness. There had been his sudden, almost savage order that poor Donald Fayrhare’s body was to be stuffed away like a dead dog’s. Had that been the first sign of the hardening of a mind’s arteries?

  Then there were those extraordinary betraying sessions of boastful axe-play. And there had been the brutal certainty with which he had scattered the Participants in that naïve orgy in the church at Hoddick. And there had been all along his utter inability, or was it unwillingness, to see how Cormode might really be finding it difficult or even inadvisable to send us the anti-tank weapons we asked for. And then his loved Margaret’s death when he had deliberately separated himself from her; that had affected him deeply I knew; but had it gone so deep that it had sent him off on a lone cold journey where no one could follow him?

  And now was this summary, just—but terrible—execution of a faithful follower the setting of the final seal on a long process?

  There was no telling. Only one thing could give the answer: time. I forced myself to suspend judgment.

  Time passed. The hay was all made in the fields now and for a spell we had soft sprawly haycocks to hide behind while we waited beside some narrow rutted lane, across which we had either dug a deep steep-sided trench or had felled a tree, waiting for a scout-car to come and the sharp minutes of battle that were as elevating and as reality-removing as a suddenly presented bottle of champagne. Next the slow round of life on the island began to move to harvest time and our struggle took on its small consequent change in shape. But the fundamentals remained. Still the Kee
pers held Lesneven and the country round about it, quite impregnably it seemed. Regular scout-car patrols made it impossible for us to contemplate an attack unless we had the weapons to deal with them in circumstances of their choosing not ours, and these we continued to lack. And still Calo and his troopers rode furiously about the whole southern part of the island defeating the Keepers here and there and then disappearing as abruptly as they had come.

  Nor were they the only disruptive elements. With the break-down of Mylchraine’s administration everywhere except in the Lesneven area and some way further south, the various gangs of bandits that had existed ever since the Keepers had made life in the island troublesome now came into their own and robbed and looted whenever they got a chance.

  The worst of them all was the gang led by the Dirk Gilhast we had first heard of as long ago as the day we had recruited young Alan Duckan at his father’s Chestnut Tree Farm. And one night, after we had had news of yet another outrage, Keig announced that he intended to present Gilhast with an ultimatum.

  And next day he sent off Francis Crowe to the cave in the mountains where we had learnt the bandit had his base. I had by now grown to expect Keig to delegate such missions—the days when he had led every attack we ever undertook himself seemed far away—but I was a little surprised at his choice of emissary. Yet, I reflected, Crowe like the rest of us had graduated, and I had no doubt the careful little barber of bygone days was perfectly capable of getting astride a horse, riding twenty miles or more across countryside in which he was liable to encounter men who would shoot on sight if they spotted his orangey-red cap, and finally tackling a brigand of Gilhast’s sort, a rough and tough outlaw from Mylchraine’s brutal semi-justice. I had even no doubt that Crowe would accomplish all this inside the strict timetable Keig had worked out for him—characteristically it included only twenty minutes for the actual negotiations: Keig had never been able to rid himself of the idea that anything that had to be said could be said in this time.

  So I had no Particular anxieties as the long motionless August day drifted by. We had an open-air headquarters at the time, in a strip of coppery-leaved beechwood with a small stream running through it, and I recall the place and the time more clearly then most simply because, I think, the weather was so marvellous. Everything floated in a haze of natural benevolence, it seemed. The sun had shone for days from slow still dawn to calm exhausted nightfall. People moved about their tasks of the harvesting with a sort of torpid leisureliness soaked up from the dry heat. It gave them an air of contentment: everything seemed possible in some future in a world where nature was so promising of abundance with the packed golden fields of corn rustling only slightly from time to time in the hot stillness.