Gunner Kelly

by Anthony Price

  Addled eggs his English vocabulary had given him, but Mother’s dictionary had warningly added the definition of addle as ‘stinking urine or liquid filth’; which he could believe now, after having traversed several trampled-down gaps in the Addle’s banks where its fauna drank and defecated, so that he didn’t even like to wipe his sweaty face with Addle-water, let alone quench his thirst with it.

  But it was easy. If there were night-guards out in Duntisbury Chase, they were not here, along the Addle—Colonel Butler had calculated correctly… . Maybe there were no such guards —maybe they had imagined the whole thing, between them, and this was all for nothing; the only obstacles to his passage were the wires stretched across the stream at field boundaries—not barbed-wires of course (not barbed-wire in the Chase!), but inoffensive strands under which he could duck with no fear of snagging himself even if he had touched them—

  It was easy—

  And now the wolf—or this fox, anyway—was almost within the fold—this fold—on the edge of the belt of trees which marked the beginning of the Roman villa-site on the outskirts of Duntisbury Royal itself, where he planned to come ashore.

  It was easy—

  He caught hold of a tree-root eroded out of the bank with his free hand, and jerked the cord which attached him to the cylinder trailing five metres behind him. This was the ideal landfall. Then, suddenly, it was not so easy!

  The bright red tip of a cigarette flared briefly, like a fire-fly in the dark, downstream not twenty metres from him, freezing him into immobility in that instant, with half his body out of the water.

  The flare died down, then disappeared altogether—there was the thick trunk of an old willow-tree curving out over the stream where it had disappeared—then the fire-fly flew in an arc, out over and into the stream, to be instantly extinguished. Not easy—but too easy: now it was his own undeserved good luck which froze him, congealing the sweat on his face as he sank back noiselessly into the stream, crouching down in it.

  He had been foolish; he had not accorded Colonel Butler his absolute confidence—and, even worse, not backing his own judgement of Duntisbury Chase, because it had seemed to him over-imaginative: Audley’s not trained to set up anything like this … But don’t underrate him for that reason: if there is anything there, waiting for you, it’ll be maybe amateurish … But, if he has anything to do with it, it won’t be predictably amateurish. So we’ll take precautions—

  He swore silently under his breath, easing himself closer to a tall growth of water-weeds on the edge of the stream. The damnable truth was that this was both predictable and amateurish, and he had still nearly been caught by it: predictable, because the air photos had shown a narrow footbridge across the Addle not far downstream from here, so that this was where he ought to have expected a hazard … and amateurish … God! If Audley hadn’t had to make do with an unskilled sentry who smoked on guard-duty he himself would be in no position now to criticise that!

  Just in time, he remembered the ersatz tree-trunk— Or not just in time—it was already floating past him downstream, fatally out of reach, and the slimy cord eluded his grip long enough to make it behave—damn it, almost level with the sentry!—as no ordinary drifting log ought to behave. He would have to let the line play out—

  “Dad!”

  The unexpected sound caught him with his senses at full stretch: dry mouth, although it wasn’t a Kalashnikov waiting for him in the dark—could the cigarette-smoker see the log?— and the sweet-rotten smell of the stream, of growing and summer-flowering things, and dead things, and wet mud in his nostrils, and all the small night sounds of the countryside in his ears.

  “Dad?”

  This time it was a much louder whisper, urgent inquiry edged with apprehension.

  “Ssssh! Over here, boy!”

  The soft crunch-and-swish marked the movement of the boy towards the man through the river-bank vegetation.

  “Ouch!”

  “Ssssh!”

  “I stung meself, Dad. Dad—”

  “What you doin‘ ’ere? Does your Mum know—?” The sentry began accusingly, cutting off the boy with his first question angrily, then amending his anger with doubt in the second question.

  “Yes, Dad. She said for me to come.”

  Benedikt recognised the speaker. But of course—if it was anyone, it would be he!

  “She—what?”

  “She said I could come. She didn’t send me. Mr Kelly sent me—she said I could come, though—”

  Kelly!

  “Kelly?”

  Mr Kelly sent me! With those four words the greater part of his mission was accomplished: Kelly was in Duntisbury Chase.

  “The police are in the village, Dad,” Benje came to the point breathlessly.

  “What?”

  “The police, Dad. Mr Russell an‘ another one—an inspector, Mr Kelly told Mum … They went to the Bells.”

  Benedikt began to play out the line, to let the log drift past the point of danger.

  “The Bells?” The father didn’t sound as intelligent as the son.

  “It’s okay—they didn’t catch ‘em. The till was open an’ the door locked … But Mr Kelly says for me to tell you to stay here—‘cause Old Joapey can’t come yet, because he was in the Bells when the police came—”

  The line tautened to full stretch. The log must be well beyond Dad by now, and there would never be a better moment to follow it, while the man was digesting this news of the police raid.

  “Mr Kelly got out the back though—” continued Benje “—an‘ he came straight to Mum—”

  Benedikt took a deep breath and sank into the water. It was hardly a metre deep, and he was forced to propel himself downstream like some blind and primitive amphibious creature, half swimming and half crawling: it was like nothing he had ever done before, but the need for absolute silence made further analysis impossible. All he could do was to count his strokes, allowing for the fact that some of them were hardly strokes at all, when his fingers sank into the mud or encountered harder objects—all the waterlogged and sunken detritus from the world outside and above the stream … fallen branches and tangled lumps of river-weed roots and the submerged stems of the reeds.

  He counted almost to the limit before anchoring one hand in a tangle and letting himself surface, pulling sideways on his anchor as he did so, so that he came up close alongside the reeds and away from open water.

  For a moment he could hear nothing. Then the soft murmur of voices came through. He had not travelled very far by the sound of them … not much further downstream from Dad than he had been upstream of the man before he had started. But the reeds were protectively tall, and the continuing murmur reassured him that his passage had gone unnoticed.

  For another moment he was torn between the temptation to stay where he was, to listen to whatever father and son had to say to each other, or to put more distance between himself and them while he had the best chance. But the temptation to stay was a weak one: the boy’s job would have been simply to have warned his father to stay on guard, or out of the village, because his relief—‘Old Joapey’, presumably—was otherwise engaged. It was unlikely that Kelly … or, more likely, Audley himself … would have confided more to a mere child, however intelligent.

  Audley … or Kelly … or both: that was the second and last part of what Colonel Butler wanted to know. And the best way to that was to move now, while he had the opportunity, while the presence of the police would inhibit movement within the village.

  He pushed out into the stream again, keeping as close to the reeds as possible, without bothering to use the image intensifier. Either the night was less dark now or his own night sight had improved: the loom of the footbridge ahead quickly became the bridge itself, a low structure similar to that beside the ford which he had already negotiated. Beyond it the trees thickened on both sides of the stream and the sun-loving reeds ended. The sky above him became patches of blue-black against a tracery of interlocking bran
ches as he approached the planned landfall.

  Everything was all right now: he was in the right place at just about the right time. He had been careless, but he had also been lucky, and the one cancelled out the other to leave him feeling slightly ridiculous. This was England, not the Other Side—and this was the altogether ridiculous River Addle, a tributary of the negligible River Avon (which was confusingly just one of the many English River Avons), not of the Elbe or the Oder or the Danube or the Vistula … And that had been Benje’s Dad smoking on the bank back there, not some double-trusted Communist border guard armed with the latest lethal technology and keen to try it out on anyone crossing his line from either side of it.

  Ridiculous indeed!

  There was an area of not-quite-darkness just ahead, beneath a break in the canopy of leaves, where the spring floods had undercut the bank to create an overhang. That would be a good place to moor the log after he had swopped the wet-suit for its contents, where if it was seen it would be thought to have snagged itself naturally among the exposed tree-roots.

  He hauled in the line, bringing the log to his landing place, and eased himself silently on to the bank. For a moment nothing stirred, then suddenly a bird squawked in panic just above his head and flapped noisily from its roost, away down the course of the stream, to find some safer refuge.

  He hugged the ground, waiting for silence to gather round him again, listening to it thicken until all he could hear came from far away: among the distant night noises he could even distinguish the faint hum of a vehicle on the main road on the ridge, two or three kilometres in a straight line across country from the valley.

  Perhaps not quite ridiculous: perhaps practice of a sort … or, if not practice, at least a reminder of the risks and discomforts which his successors in the field must endure on his orders—successors who could not depend on luck cancelling carelessness.

  Well … the silence around him was absolute again, and the fox was in the fold undetected, with a job to do … so whether that job was ridiculous, or a little gentle practice, or a timely reminder of harsher realities … all of that hardly mattered.

  He sighed, and lifted the log out of the water on to dry land, feeling along it in the dark for the concealed catches which opened it.

  Out of the wet-suit, and dry, and properly dressed again like an innocent tourist—an innocent Thomas Wiesehöfer—he felt much better.

  Of course, he was still an intruder, and if challenged and identified he had only his story of an evening walk on the downland which had been overtaken by darkness and had ended with his becoming hopelessly lost. Even as he rehearsed it to himself while crossing the Roman villa field from the stream, it sounded thin and unconvincing to him. But what could they do but believe him?

  And, anyway, thin and unconvincing or not, it was better than being caught in a wet-suit: a stranger in slightly crumpled slacks and wind-cheater might or might not be up to no good. But a stranger abroad in a wet-suit after dark could only be either a lunatic or a villain.

  But … beneath what could they do? that other question still plagued him, as it plagued Colonel Butler: What was Audley doing?

  It was extraordinary that the inhabitants of a peaceful English village should conspire together to revenge themselves on a terrorist. And yet, supposing that they had found some way of luring the killer to them, it was not unbelievable.

  Even Colonel Butler had admitted that: “We don’t have the death penalty, Captain Schneider—every time it comes up in Parliament on a free vote it’s thrown out. But if you put it to a referendum … which God forbid! … we’d have it back—and probably public executions as well. What they’d say is … killing children and coppers on the beat… ‘String ’em up‘. And rapists who kill, and traitors, and terrorists— ’Hanging’s too good for them‘, they’d say—the majority would … terrorists—and particularly terrorists with bombs …”

  He could see the churchyard wall ahead, and the stile which he had crossed and recrossed a few hours earlier.

  The age of direct action: The Greens and Ban the Bomb, Ban Nuclear Power, Ban War itself… And here they had, if not the Greens, something like them in England—CND and other peace movements … and Greenpeace, and all the animal-lovers, who raided the laboratories and disrupted the hunting of animals.

  Hunting humans, now—maybe that wasn’t so wicked!

  He climbed the stile, avoiding the gravel path in preference for the noiseless grass between the gravestones.

  Colonel Butler: “They’ve got longer memories in the country … Not that they needed them for the Old General. He was something rather special, so it seems—something out of the past, just as Duntisbury Chase and Duntisbury Royal are also out of the past, and rather special… I think we have to accept that they conceive they have a duty—that they loved him and that therefore they have the obligation and the right to avenge him, Captain.”

  That was the motive-power behind direct action, and what made it so dangerous: it had the powerful fuels of love and duty and self-righteousness in the engine-room, which gave ordinary decent men and women the resolution to act and to endure.

  He could see the tall cross of the War Memorial ahead of him now, between two of the ancient yew-trees which the English habitually planted in their churchyards—

  The question was not where the true power came from— here, in this churchyard, approaching that cross, which was the symbol of the Saviour of both the English and the Germans in their last hour, commemorating the fallen on both sides— which had been Papa’s cross and Mother’s cross simultaneously … the question was who was on the bridge here, at the controls, in the driving seat, directing that power to what ends?

  He came to the churchyard’s wicket-gate, close by the memorial and with the loom of the Eight Bells on his left. There was a single light in the public house, but in a dormer window in the roof, not at ground level; yet there was no police car in the car park—there were no cars at all… And Colonel Butler had promised that the police would stay in the village, prowling around, until after midnight.

  He looked at his watch.

  The question was … but the question divided itself as he approached it…

  Rebecca Maxwell-Smith and the inhabitants of Duntisbury Royal might have desired vengeance, but they would not have known how to encompass it.

  Mr Kelly—Gunner Kelly, from long ago—would have desired that same vengeance … and if Colonel Butler’s guess was correct Kelly was the extra ingredient in the Duntisbury Chase conspiracy.

  But it was Dr David Audley who gave that conspiracy a dimension of importance to the security of the state—who, if the Colonel was right, would not be interested in vengeance, and who would not connive in murder, least of all a murder by Miss Rebecca Maxwell-Smith, whose welfare he had promised to safeguard.

  But now the more important question was … how long after midnight would the police prowl around Duntisbury Royal? And that relegated all the other questions to temporary obscurity.

  Through the wicket-gate—it had been well-oiled at midday, so it would not betray him now—and quickly across the road to the grass verge on the other side: at least he possessed the enormous advantage of having walked through the village this afternoon in Benje’s company, even if he had been steered away from the lodge gates, and the lodge, and the manor house itself.

  And another thing was for sure: he could not approach the lodge, where Gunner Kelly lived, directly from the road. If there had been someone on watch at the ford and near the footbridge, there would surely be someone in the tangle of shrubbery on each side keeping an eye on those iron gates. But that presented no special problem, because where the grounds of the manor fronted the village there was a thick belt of trees held back by a stone wall; and the wall, neither too high nor (so far as he had observed) topped with spikes or broken glass, he could scale at any point (spikes and lacerating points of glass would not be the Maxwell family style: the esteem in which they were held suggested to Benedi
kt that they would fight their intruders fairly, without such unpleasantness).

  Where to cross the wall, though … that had to be an arbitrary decision: not too close to the lodge entrance, but it was a long wall, undulating with the rise and fall of the land itself, so not too far away either.

  When he was half-way to the gates, approaching headlights drove him down into the shelter of the convenient gateway of a darkened cottage: he shrank close to a thick hedge until the vehicle cruised past slowly, its lights searching out the road ahead of it; but, with relief, he saw that it was Mr Russell’s police car, unmistakable with its broad red-stripe-against-white as it rolled by, even though its illuminated Police sign was not switched on. And with Mr Russell still in Duntisbury Royal now he could reasonably depend on a few undisturbed minutes. Darkness and silence settled back in its wake, and this piece of wall was as good as any other.

  Over the wall, under the trees, it was darker still, and he would dearly have liked the help of the torch with which the SAS cylinder had supplied him. But although it was impossible now to move in total silence, the thick carpet of leaves, soft and springy under his feet, blanked out all but the occasional sound.

  Also, the trees were not so thick that he couldn’t make out the obstacles ahead of him: separate tangles of branches and thickets of vegetation in clearings routed him through the woods along an obvious path, with no real alternative. And he knew, estimating distance half by experience from the afternoon and half by his sixth directional sense, that he was making progress to where he wanted to go, safely inside the manor grounds at the rear of the house itself.

  Then his next step sank deeper into the leaves—

  And deeper—

  And deeper—and suddenly too deep—

  Too late, he tried to throw his weight back, as his foot sank down past ankle, past knee—suddenly he had no foot, no ankle, no knee, no leg, and he was trying to fall back, but he was falling forwards into ground which was opening up underneath him—

  V

  THE PIT, on a quick estimate, was something more than three metres deep—nearer four even—and at least two metres square at the bottom. And its walls were sheer.