by Nevil Shute
The girl looked up into his face, and I saw her squeeze his hand. “It’s quite all right,” she breathed. “This is just an accident.” They stood there for an instant very close together, in common defiance of the enemy—myself.
“God damn you!” he burst out suddenly, and shook her off. “Get along back to Under, where you belong!” And then to the girl: “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get along out of this.”
He swung round, and went off up the platform. The girl cried—“Alan!”—after him, but he never turned. She hesitated for a moment, and decided she must say something to me.
“I’m so frightfully sorry,” she said. “He—he’s not quite himself.”
I nodded. “I know. That’s perfectly all right.”
She was going off after him, but she stopped dead at that and came back to me. “What do you mean by that? How much do you know about it?”
I hesitated in my turn, and then: “I know he shot down a machine the other night, under orders,” I replied.
He was fifty yards away by that time, walking with his head down among the crowd. He stopped for a moment, and looked back. The girl stared at me most urgently. “Tell me, was it fair?” I didn’t understand what she meant. “Oh, was it a fair fight? He’s so frightfully upset because he says it—it wasn’t. He says all the time that it was … just murder.”
In the bustle of the crowd it seemed to me that there came a little pause at that, as though all the world were waiting for my answer. She had courage, that girl. “I’m afraid the other fellow wasn’t armed.” I said. “He hadn’t got a gun. In that way it was—very easy for him.”
She stared at me wide-eyed for a minute. “I see,” she said. “Thanks for telling me.” And then she turned and ran off up the platform after him, and I stood there watching till I saw her take his arm, and they went away together.
I turned away depressed, and went and found a corner seat in the train. And then, as I opened my evening paper at the middle page, I got a shock. There was half a column of it, and it began:
BUTLER SHOT
OUTRAGE IN A SUSSEX MANSION
Under Hall, the residence of Lord Arner, a historic mansion prettily situated near the old-world village of Under in West Sussex, was the scene of a violent affray early this morning, when Mr. Albert Sanders, butler in the mansion, was shot in the shoulder in an endeavour to detain a burglar. Mr. Sanders is understood to be in a serious condition.
It is understood that the outrage occurred in the Steward’s House, a building situated at a short distance from the mansion and normally occupied by Mr. Peter Moran, agent to the estate. In the absence of Mr. Moran it is presumed that Mr. Sanders entered the house and surprised a burglar, who shot him and escaped by the open window. The shot was heard by several of the employees of the house, who rushed in and found Mr. Sanders lying on the floor of the sitting-room. The assailant made good his escape.
There were several paragraphs more of it, but no more news. They gave a little bit about Sanders, another little bit about myself, and a condensed biography of Lord Arner. I had plenty of time to think about it while the train meandered down to Petersfield, and I cannot say that I found my reflections very pleasant.
There was only one possible explanation of it, that I could see. There was only one possible thing in my rooms worth burgling the house for—only one thing that could possibly involve the use of firearms. It was only then that it came home to me what a ruddy fool I’d been about those plates. I’d left them sculling about where anyone could see them, thinking that they were harmless now that I’d exposed them. The upshot of it was that some Russian organisation had got wind of the situation, and paid me a visit to collect their property. I was dead certain that that was what had happened. Sanders had blundered in upon them by chance, attempted to defend my property … and they’d let fly at him.
I cursed myself most bitterly for all sorts of a ruddy fool not to have foreseen something of this sort. I might have known that to hang on to that box of plates was simply asking for it.
I got down to Petersfield at about five o’clock, and Kitter was on the platform there to meet me. I swung out of the carriage and gave him my case. “How’s Sanders?” I asked.
“Doin’ fine, sir. You’ve heard about it then?”
I nodded. “Is he much hurt?”
“They shot him through the shoulder, sir.” He touched his shoulder to show me exactly where the bullet had gone in. “It went in here and came out at the back, sir. Doctor Armitage said it was providential it wasn’t higher up, sir, or it’d have bust his shoulder-blade. It do seem a terrible thing to happen, and nine o’clock o’ the morning, in England.”
“Do you know how it happened?”
He shook his head. “Not rightly. The safe was all shut up when we went in. I don’t know as they had time to pinch anything. I think Mr. Sanders surprised them in your room, like. And then they shot at him, and Mrs. Oliver was out in the yard near the door and she heard the shot, and she heard Mr. Sanders cry out. And she called to me and I got Watson because he was just in the garden there, and he brought a fork with him, and we went into your house and the window was open and Mr. Sanders on the floor, sir. And then we telephoned for the doctor, but I don’t know what we’d have done but for the lady. She put him to rights before the doctor came, an’ got him up to bed, an’ that. And he’s going on quite all right, sir.”
I wrinkled my brows. “What lady is that?”
“I forgot to tell you, sir. She’s waiting to see you when you get back. That gentleman what’s been staying with you—his wife.”
“Mrs. Lenden?”
“That’s right, sir. They arrived together in your car not a minute or two after we found Mr. Sanders, and long before the doctor came. And the lady knew just what to do, and she and Mrs. Richards bound him up a treat with bandages and all. And then the doctor came, and the police, and Sanders told them what had happened, but I wasn’t there then, only Mrs. Richards and the gentleman and his wife. And then we got Sanders up to bed, and a little while after that the gentleman went away in your Morris, sir.”
“D’you know where he went to?”
“Yes, sir. He was going to Dover, and he was in a great hurry. I filled up the Morris with four gallons, sir, and lent him a couple o’ maps.” He paused, and then he said: “The lady’s at your house now, sir. Waiting to see you.”
I stood for a moment on the platform. The train had steamed away down the hill to Portsmouth, and I was the last passenger to leave. Over the downs the sun was going down; from where I stood I could trace the hogged line of the hills from Butser to South Harting. Beyond that lay my own country and … I didn’t know what.
I turned to the Siddeley. “We’d better get along back there then,” I said. “And pretty quick.”
He made that car move faster than she’d ever gone before along the road to Under, and he got there long before I had time to make my plans. The car swung round the gate-post on two wheels and came to rest in the yard. “I’ll see Sanders first,” I said to Kitter. “If he’s awake.”
I went into the house by the back. A maid that I met in the passage told me that Mrs. Richards, the housekeeper, was sitting with Mr. Sanders in his room. She had heard that Mr. Sanders was getting on nicely, and had had a little sleep during the afternoon. It was a terrible thing, she said, and she hoped I wouldn’t find anything taken, papers or that, and not as if he was a young man, neither.
I went on upstairs. He had a little sitting-room of his own in the servants’ wing, with a bedroom opening out of it. Both were furnished very profusely in the Victorian manner, with furniture that I think had once graced the house and had been turned out to make room for older stuff, or newer. An ornately framed photograph of a forbidding old woman who had been his mother hung above his bed; in the sitting-room there was a brightly-coloured oleograph of King Edward and Queen Alexandra at their coronation.
Mrs. Richards was sitting by his bed, and reading the lead
ing article in the Morning Post to him aloud, with long pauses of non-comprehension between the sentences. I heard them at it as I came upstairs. He had his own copy of the Morning Post every day—a perquisite that I had not dared to curtail when I took over the reins after the war. I don’t think he has ever read anything else, except possibly the Bible. Country-bred—gardener’s boy, footman, valet, and finally to butler. It makes a difference.
Mrs. Richards got up as I entered, and began to talk. I let her run on for a little, and then moved up to his bedside. I don’t know how old he was, but old enough to be very badly shaken by a thing like that. His flannel nightgown had had one sleeve cut off, and the arm was bandaged closely to his body.
I said the usual things that one does say at a time like that. He was as comfortable as they could make him in the circumstances, but he was in for a bad night of it. They had sent for a nurse from Portsmouth, and were expecting her very soon, they said. Sanders himself was pretty cheerful; I was relieved by the way he greeted me. He wasn’t very badly hurt. And then I asked him how it happened, and he looked about him for a little without speaking, and finally he said something inconsequent. I divined what he wanted, and sent Mrs. Richards on a vain errand.
He said that he had gone over to my rooms with a bottle of whisky in his hand to fill up my decanter.
“The window was open wide, sir. And there was two men there, one of them just outside the window and one right inside the room. Right inside. They must have come in through the kitchen garden from the lane, and then through the little green gate. The only way they could have come, sir.”
I nodded. “Did you recognise either of them?”
“That brother of Nitter’s was one, sir—the one outside. Not the one that had the pistol, but the other one. I didn’t tell that to the police, sir, seeing that it touches the town and thinking that I should rightly tell you before saying anything. But that’s one of them.”
He had barely given a glance to him. The other man, he said, had rather a fat, white face, and was taller and broader than Nitter. He had a brown soft hat on. He was standing by the safe, and as he entered Sanders saw him pick up something black.
“One of your books from the safe, or something of that, sir,” he said. “A black one, and rather fat. Would that be anything important?”
I shook my head slowly. “It sounds like the cash-book. I don’t think that’d do them much good.”
Sanders had made some exclamation as he entered. The man who was inside the room whipped round at that and made for the window, taking the black packet with him. Nitter was already outside. And then old Sanders, who had lived all his life in Under and found London a confusing place and terribly expensive, acted promptly and with decision. The man with the fat, white face was at the window when Sanders lifted the whisky bottle that he was carrying and flung it straight across the room with all the force of his old arm. It hit the chap on the shoulder, cannoned heavily off his head, and burst against the wall. Sanders ran forward to grapple.
He never saw the man draw his gun. He only knew that two shots were fired, and he was sure it wasn’t Nitter. Something went singing past his ear in an explosion, and another crashed through the soft part of his shoulder. “And then,” he said naïvely, “I seemed to get one foot in front of the other, sir, and I fell down.” He stayed down till Kitter and Watson came bursting in, a minute or two later, and found him on the floor.
“I gave Mrs. Richards the key to the silver cupboard, sir,” he continued. “And there’s eight dessert-spoons and four tablespoons in the left-hand drawer in the pantry, and a tea-spoon in Miss Sheila’s room what she has for her medicine. And I told Arthur that when he lays the table this evening he’s to go to Mrs. Richards and she’ll give him the silver out of the cupboard, and he’s to take it straight back to her when it’s washed, and no nonsense. And then there’s the tea-pot what was used for breakfast. That will be in the pantry on the shelf, unless Mrs. Richards thought to lock it up with the rest.”
“I’ll see her about that when I go down,” I promised him.
I stayed up there with him for a quarter of an hour longer, listening to his instructions about the silver and the wine. He insisted on giving me the key of the cellars. I could have left him much earlier but—well, I suppose it comes to this, that I was shirking. Waiting in my house was the girl that I had met in Winchester, and I was afraid to go and meet her.
I realised that at last, and went downstairs.
There was nobody about in the mansion. I don’t know what happened to Lady Arner that day; I suppose she was keeping to her room. Arner himself was up in Town, and Sheila had gone off early in the morning to visit friends in Hornsea, and was still away. I went out of the mansion into the yard, and crossed over to my own house.
And there was Mrs. Lenden in the sitting-room by the window. She had turned on the reading-lamp by the piano and she was sitting on the window-seat, in the gloom outside the circle of light. I do not think that she can have been doing anything at all, but wait for me.
I crossed the room to her. “Good evening,” I said. “I’d have come over before, but I went up to see Sanders. They told me that you were here.”
She inclined her head gravely. “They’ve told you all about it?”
“I think I’ve probably heard most of it,” I replied. “All but one thing, that I don’t quite follow. Where’s Lenden gone off to?”
She didn’t answer at once. “He left a letter for you,” she said. “He wanted to do that, because he was a bit worried about taking your car away again without asking. There it is, on the table.”
I took it up. It came in an envelope, and gummed down. I stood there fingering it for a minute, but I didn’t open it at once. And while I was hesitating there, the girl got up from the window-seat and came over to me by the table.
“Do you know what it was that they stole?” she asked.
I moistened my lips. “The plates, I suppose.”
She nodded. “That was it. Maurice told me about it last night. The whole thing—everything that he told you. And he told me all about what’s happened since he’s been here. You’ve been most frightfully good to us, Mr. Moran. To us both.”
I cleared my throat. “That doesn’t matter,” I said at last, and I was startled for the moment by the strangeness of my own voice.
She shook her head. “But it does matter. You don’t see it, but it matters—frightfully. It was because you were so decent to him that Maurice stayed here after the first day when he was ill. If it hadn’t been for that, he’d have gone straight back to Russia directly he was well enough to travel. And the plates would have been there by now. And developed and everything….”
I couldn’t have found anything to say to her then in any case. But I didn’t want to say anything. The less I said the better, until I had heard the whole of what she had to tell me. And so I stood there looking at her dumbly, and she thought that I was embarrassed at her praise, and she smiled a little to make me feel less awkward. Even at such a time she could do that.
“It’s because you were so frightfully decent to him about it all that we’ve got just the one chance to put it right,” she said.
I nodded slowly. “I see,” I muttered, and stood there fingering the letter.
She went wandering in her narrative, and I didn’t dare to recall her to the point. “One reads about spies in books and things,” she said absently, “and it all seems—unreal. Not the sort of thing that could possibly happen in one’s life. And then—well, it does.”
She raised her eyes to mine. “Maurice didn’t think about being a spy,” she said. “Honestly—I know he didn’t. All he ever thought about was the job—the flying, and whether he’d be able to keep his course all right, and how he’d be able to find out what the wind was doing, and what height he’d have to be when he let off the firework. And whether a thousand pounds was the right fee for all that night flying, and what he’d have got for a series of long night flights like
that if it had been in England. You see, it’s his profession, and it’s all he thinks about. It’s—it’s the only thing he lives for, really.”
She paused for a minute, and then she began again: “I know him so well. I’ve helped him so often with his plans for long flights like that. I used to sit and write down things for him in the evenings when he was plotting his route on maps and things, and I used to make little lists of things that he mustn’t forget to tell the mechanics in the morning. We used to do everything like that together. And so you see, I do know. Honestly. He gets so keen upon a job, and he does his job so well for its own sake, that he forgets about the rest of it.”
I said something then. I don’t know what. At all events, she didn’t heed it.
“Do you know what we came over here for this morning?” she inquired. “To get those plates back again. And then he was going to expose them.” I think she may have thought from the expression on my face that I didn’t understand her. “You know, it’s an awfully quick plate, because it was for using at night. It’s quite easy to spoil a plate like that, and ruin the picture on it. You’ve only got to take it out of the case and expose it to the light for ever so short a time, and it’s done for. I know, because I used to have a Kodak once, and I spoilt some. And Maurice says it’s just the same with plates as it is with films.”
I crossed over and kicked the fire up into a blaze. “You were going to do that this morning?” I inquired. It was the shortest, the most non-committal thing that I could find to say.
She nodded. “We talked it all over last night, at Winchester. You see”—she glanced up at me wistfully—“we couldn’t possibly let those plates go back to Russia. It’s not the thing to do. Maurice saw that for himself, just as much as I did. It only wanted someone to put it to him.”
There was a little pause at that. “It wanted you to put it to him,” I said. “I can’t say that I had much success.”
I really think that was a new idea to her. “I suppose that’s true,” she said. And then she went on to tell me how they had driven over from Winchester after an early breakfast, and had arrived not five minutes after the burglary had taken place.
