Two things were supremely important: whether they had another craft capable of pursuit; and whether by the side of this loch as it stretched into distance there was any sort of motor road. Eliminate these dangers and her position was the strongest she had yet achieved. It was also almost alarmingly dramatic. For, whether she liked it or not, she was hurtling straight towards the heart of the mystery. The bogus Forsaken Garden and the genuine Ode on the Natural Beauties of the Highlands of Scotland between them told her that. At the head of the loch, invisible behind the mists of evening, was the Wind-cuffer. And the last lonely fountain lay on a straight line beyond.
If they had a boat with which to pursue her it would be on the water by now. So far so good. She glanced to her left – it must be almost due west – in search of a road. But the pines marched almost to the verge of the water, and they stood on broken ground that swept steeply upwards. Good again, she thought – and looked the other way. Again there was no road: but nevertheless she found something to give her pause. She was flashing past a boathouse – an oddly large boathouse, which must almost certainly be theirs. Danger perhaps in that, but only the merest track could lead to it. And, although it was securely barred, it had an appearance of neglect and decay. With luck she was safe on that count, too.
The day was done. Solemn and grey, great clouds of evening floated golden tipped in the west, and against this uncertain background the topmost pines showed at once menacing and unreal. From the waters before her a last luminousness was fading. Visibility would soon be bad.
For this pace, very bad indeed. And the thought had no sooner come to Sheila than danger was actual and upon her. She was steering now by the eastern bank, which a moment before had seemed to run northwards in an unbroken line. Suddenly it had leapt towards her and she saw, as she swung her helm to port, that the loch was here almost cut in two by a curving tongue of land so low as to be almost invisible in her present situation. And she was only just in time. A protruding root scraped and jarred her bow, there was a jerk and a choke as the screw fouled reeds or weed, and then she was free again and running at half speed towards the western bank. A swing to starboard through a narrow channel, and the glimmering loch was clear before her once more.
The heart of the bay. Stand by Castle Troy and bring an imaginary bisection of this curved promontory in line with the Wind-cuffer and one would be looking straight at the goal. She had passed another landmark.
As the enemy must long ago have done. Whatever mystery there was, the clock had surely beaten her to it by now. And from making contact with authority she seemed as far away as ever. Castle Troy appeared to lie in country as solitary as did the croft in which she had been first imprisoned and the sinister mansion which had swallowed Dick Evans. Between her and the dead garden – whatever the dead garden might be or mean – there was perhaps nobody at all. Seven sad leagues. Something over twenty miles from Castle Troy. She must be almost halfway there now. And she would go on. If she saw sign of human habitation she would reconnoitre it. But if this solitude continued unbroken she would go straight on and try to find where the enigma lay. Perhaps when she got there she would find the elusive county police. Perhaps they would have discovered and contrived to follow the clue she had managed to leave on the damaged truck.
There was a moon. It would be up shortly after nightfall, and in any case she would have made the head of the loch before that. Plenty of lochs in Scotland nearly twenty miles long – but few, Loch Ness and Loch Lomond apart, longer than that. In twenty minutes at most, if her petrol held and she made no mistake with the unfamiliar mechanisms she was controlling, the boat would have taken her as far as it could go. And then –
Sheila’s train of thought was abruptly broken. A little way ahead, and to the left, a single light had sprung up in the dusk. The boat drew nearer and it took on tone – golden and mellow; nearer still and it took shape – the oblong shape of an uncurtained window. She shut off the engine and silence, filling the void where a moment before had been shattering sound, pressed upon her like a physical thing. Then came the soft hiss and ripple of water still parting before her. And then a voice.
She swung the boat in towards the shore and saw a second and larger oblong of light. A door. And silhouetted against it was the figure of a man. He was talking. His voice came distinctly over the water and Sheila strained her ears. A foreign language.
The momentum of the boat had taken it within thirty yards of the solitary figure. Sheila’s hand was going out to start the engine hastily when she heard:
‘Dainonioi, muthous men huperphialous aleasthe pantas homos…’
A foreign language, but one which was more reassuring than any English could have been. Enemy agents do not stand in the dusk by highland lochs chanting ancient Greek. With the little way that was left to her Sheila let the boat glide to within a dozen yards of the shore. And then she called out: ‘Ahoy! Who are you?’
The man was standing before the open door of what appeared to be a small cottage on the water’s edge. At Sheila’s call he stopped chanting and there was a moment’s silence. Then a cultured voice said: ‘I beg your pardon. I hope I did not startle you.’
Coming in answer to an abrupt challenge which had followed hard upon the hideous racket of a powerful motorboat, this was exceedingly polite. Sheila felt foolish – and spoke foolishly as a result. ‘Are you,’ she demanded, ‘British?’
‘British?’ The voice appeared to weigh his question carefully. ‘In the modern sense of the word, madam – yes. I am an Englishman.’ There was a pause and the voice appeared to think some further apology civil. ‘Perhaps my language misled you. I was repeating Homer. I am apt to do it – and preferably in the open air – when disturbed, or upon hearing bad news.’
‘Bad news?’ There was a little landing stage and Sheila had glided up to it. ‘There’s bad news?’ War, thought Sheila. Perhaps they’ve got the Forth Bridge. Perhaps what I might have prevented is something like that.
‘Yes. It has just come over on the news bulletin. Rain at Dabdab. A perfect deluge. The dig will be ruined.’
‘Oh.’
There was another pause. And then the voice spoke again as if aware of a discourteous obscurity. ‘You see, I am an archaeologist and such a mischance is important to me. My name is Hetherton – Ambrose Hetherton.’ There was a further pause, ‘It promises,’ said Mr Hetherton, ‘a clement night.’
Sheila laughed a little shakily. ‘Would you mind,’ she asked, ‘if I came on land? And – and in?’
Mr Hetherton hastened forward. ‘Really, you must forgive my appearing so inhospitable. My mind will stray back, you know, to Dabdab. My quarters are somewhat primitive, but there is not a bad fire. Mind the log. Please notice the step.’ They entered a low, lamp-lit room, strewn with books and fishing tackle. ‘How deplorably untidy it all is! I have borrowed the cottage of a friend and I may not unfairly plead that some part of the guilt is his. This chair – allow me to remove the eggs – is not at all uncomfortable. Somewhere’ – he looked round vaguely – ‘there are cigarettes. Virginian, I fear. And perhaps you would take a glass of wine? Or a little whisky, even? And perhaps it might not be impertinent if I recorded my impression’ – and Mr Hetherton, who was cruising vaguely round the room, turned round and looked at Sheila with extreme penetration – ‘that you are in some distress?’
‘Yes, I am. My name is Sheila Grant. I–’
‘My dear Miss Grant, I am delighted you are safe. The broadcasting device’ – he pointed to a corner and Sheila saw that this was his way of describing a wireless set – ‘has told me that you have anxious friends. I wonder–’ Mr Hetherton paused, as if wondering whether he were at all entitled to wonder.
‘I was kidnapped and escaped. Have you a telephone? A car?’
‘Neither. There is the merest track, along which a cart will come for me in some days’ time.’ Mr Hetherton too
k another appraising glance at Sheila, moved to a cupboard, and began quite briskly setting out a meal. Then he spoke with decision. ‘Miss Grant, you had better tell me about it at once.’
‘Yes.’ Sheila felt her head swimming slightly: perhaps it was the peat smoke which hung about the room. ‘It began with overhearing somebody recite a poem on a train – a poem about a garden.’
The eye of Mr Hetherton, which had narrowed in the task of choosing between alternative bottles of sherry, rounded slightly. ‘Two poems about a garden,’ he said; ‘a missing Orchard, a dead man, and a kidnapped girl. I have a friend called Appleby who would be better at putting it all together than I am likely to be.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Do you care for sardines? I fear my stores are extremely limited. But at least they come from the neighbourhood of Sardinia and not that of the North Cape.’ He hesitated. ‘Miss Grant, you appear to me to be a person of resolution. And so I will tell you that the last man who overheard a poem about a garden – and it may well have been on a train – was shot. Dead.’
‘They just kidnapped me. Yes, please, I do like sardines. But later on I was machine-gunned. That was when I was getting away in the motorboat from Castle Troy. It’s a nest of spies.’
Mr Hetherton, who had begun to open the sardines, looked up mildly from his task, listening. Then he laid down the tin opener, his hand went up to the low ceiling, and the room was suddenly in darkness. ‘What they call a black-out,’ he said. ‘I fear everybody will have experience of it soon. Behind you are two rugs: take them. I have the sherry and the sardines, and here is a loaf. One moment – a torch. And now out to your boat. There is no road round the loch – nor one to anywhere near the head of it. But there is a track, as I have said, to this cottage, and our enemies may be searching this way. Notice the step. If only I had some faculty for rapid decision! Please mind the log.’
They were outside the cottage and in darkness. And from somewhere came the hum of a petrol engine drawing rapidly nearer.
‘Miss Grant’ – Hetherton’s voice came, at once crisp and mild, out of the night – ‘they are about a mile away. We shall have time, if only your boat will start. I leave that to you. I have forgotten something.’
He turned back to the cottage and Sheila leapt into the motorboat. Awkward if she muffed the controls now. But she didn’t. Her hands moved confidently in the darkness. The boat wouldn’t start, all the same.
Somewhere in the life of this complicated and powerful thing there was a hitch. And no possibility of investigating. There was the roar of an engine – not hers – and behind the cottage twin beams of light sprang, curved, halted. Running men.
Out of the cottage, silhouetted again, came Hetherton, running – in his hands what looked like an outlandish spear. A gaff for salmon, perhaps. He was beside her – and confusedly behind him the running men. He shoved at the boat and in the same moment one of the men jumped and landed straddled on the bow. The gaff whisked through the air, the bow was clear, Sheila was two yards out. She saw Hetherton turn, thrust, topple backwards into water and darkness. And beneath her she felt the boat quiver, bucket, throb. The engine had started; it was racing in neutral; there was a wobble and something tumbled at her feet. Hetherton. She had turned the rising nose of the craft and was heading across the loch. She had the impression that there was no shooting this time.
The moon was up but obscured in light cloud. Beyond the shattering pulse of the engine the night could be sensed in widening circles of silence; the violence of what lay behind slipped into sudden unreality, like a nightmare so brief that one awakes from it without confusion. Sheila glanced down at Hetherton. He seemed to have taken off most of his clothes and to be wringing them out over the side. ‘You are not hurt?’ she asked.
‘Indeed, no. But two of those men are – badly, I fear. There was no time for nice calculation.’
‘Indeed, no.’ Sheila was momentarily light-hearted. ‘I’m glad you managed to scramble in.’
‘So am I. I think we may be able, after all, to put two and two together in an approximate but still useful way. Go straight up the loch, keeping farther in towards the right. We shall then be in shadow when the moon comes out. We want just enough light to distinguish the bank.’
The boat leapt ahead; only the stern was in water; beneath them was an extraordinary resilience of air. ‘We can’t be far from the head of the loch now,’ Sheila said. ‘Shall we–’ She paused, realizing that her voice was unnaturally loud. It was necessary to shout because of the engine, but now the engine wasn’t there. A choke, a splutter, a final leap of power, and the boat was hissing forward with an idle screw. The petrol had given out and presently they would drift to a halt.
‘The moon,’ Hetherton said.
Everything was very still, like an audience watching a diffused light grow on an empty stage. Space and dark water faintly lapping were around them, and beyond on either side the darker masses of hill and pine. But straight ahead and clear in moonlight was a mountain: a little system of mountains crowned by a pinnacle which hung poised in air, hung as if supported on wings which were two shoulders running obliquely east and west. And down to the loch, wedge-shaped as the tail of a hawk, ran a long slope of moor and scree.
It was the Wind-cuffer. There could be no doubt of that.
19: A Scientist Imagines Things
‘A Mr Rodney Orchard,’ Hetherton said. ‘There was an appeal for him in the six o’clock bulletin. Sudden illness somewhere, I suppose.’
The boat had drifted into a little bay wholly in shadow. They had tied up, and wrapped in rugs Sheila had slept, tired out. Now they were eating bread and sardines and taking alternate swigs of the bottle of sherry: Sheila felt her body shot and traversed by fine lines of invisible fire. Very lightly the loch lapped against the bank; high up in the pines a faint wind stirred.
‘My attention was held by the name: it was familiar without my being able to place it. How deplorably narrow-based one’s information tends to be today! We work hard enough at the everything-about-something, and leave the something-about-everything to take care of itself. But I think he is a man of science. And he is certainly the mysterious garden which both you and my friend Appleby have run across in rhyme. In other words, he is in some retired corner of the country immediately to the north of us, and we must suppose him to be in danger. I greatly hope that my recollection will presently aid me to some idea of the last lonely fountain… You say you were machine-gunned? Such an outrage is almost incredible.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Sheila fished in the little tin for the tail of a sardine. ‘Fair enough, in a way. It’s a big organization there at Troy, and it was it or me.’
Hetherton took a moment to interpret this colloquial expression. ‘It or us, now.’ He paused. ‘I am so glad you turned up.’
Sheila was munching sardines.
‘I have always wanted something like this.’ The cultured voice in the darkness was suddenly boyish. ‘But of course I have never had the enterprise to go and look for it. Surely a gift of fortune that it should come and look for me. But this is talk’ – there was the sound of the sherry bottle being set down and the voice took on a faint and pleasing irony – ‘which owes too much to the romantic influences of the night. Our business is to get forward.’
‘To the lonely fountain?’
‘I judge not. We must get our information to some centre where it will take more than a machine-gun to stifle it. And that means Fortmoil, some ten miles north. More or less on the line of the fountain, one may guess. It will be best, if you feel fit for it, to walk through what remains of the night. If the organization behind us is, as you say, large it may have the power of sending out a considerable screen of scouts.’
‘Can they get round us?’
‘The road to Fortmoil is from the north-east, so they have a big detour to mak
e. And our path gives us the advantage of cover almost continuously: through these woods to the head of the loch, up the eastern slope of the Wind-cuffer and through a species of col, then more pine woods most of the way.’
‘We’d better start now.’
‘I agree. The woods come right down to the water’s edge and the ground is rough. But there is little undergrowth, and if the moonlight holds something of it will filter through the trees… The last sardine is yours.’
‘Is it?’ Hetherton, Sheila thought, was comfortingly precise for the dim sort of scholar he appeared to be; his precision had even overflowed his courtesy in this brisk allocation of the final fragment of their meal. ‘I certainly mustn’t have more sherry.’
‘It is hardly the moment pede libero pulsanda tellus. Rather pedetemptim must be the word.’ Hetherton chuckled happily at this Horatian allusion. ‘We had better not flash the torch. Mind the boathook. Please remark this rock.’ He handed Sheila to the bank.
It was a long trudge and scramble, with Hetherton doing most of the path finding. The small hours were cold and still; the moon set and their pace was slow. The false Alaster, Belamy Mannering, Castle Troy: increasingly Sheila found these hanging between her and the darkness. She tried to visualize what lay ahead: police, telephones, cars at Fortmoil; Orchard in his retreat with some net closing about him; even disaster to herself at the hands of a further lurking enemy. But always Castle Troy and Belamy Mannering and the false Alaster came back; she felt the passion and discipline that could achieve all that – its assurance and word-perfect ingenuity. Spies: the idea was outmoded. These were something more. They were the secret vanguard. But of what? And she said aloud: ‘Of what?’
The Secret Vanguard Page 13
