The propaganda of ten years, seeping into the mind of an already aggressive personality had simplified Shratt’s political thinking to the point of absurdity, but it had not eroded his abundant stock of commonsense as regards how to survive or how to conduct himself as a professional fighting man. His instincts were sharp and keen. His powers of observation were considerable. Above all, his physical stamina and resolution were unimpaired by the frustration of fifteen months behind barbed wire. In addition to all this he had something comparatively rare in the German soldier, an ability, indeed a preference, to act on his own initiative and make his own on-the-spot decisions and, if necessary adapt his plans to changing circumstances. Once having learned the rudiments of his craft at sea he had not found it necessary to go by the book. He had, in fact, thrown the book away for it was his experience that every separate decision was regulated by a specific set of circumstances and that circumstances were fluid and could flow in any direction. It was this basic characteristic that had enabled him to survive the sinking of his U-boat off Rosyth in the spring of 1941. Alone among the crew he had kept himself afloat in rough water for more than two hours, saved by a rubber flask of spirit and a lifebelt fitted with a luminous dial, gadgets he had thought out for himself when the superiors were too busy or too pigheaded to follow his advice. His initiative, plus his ability to convert his memory into a well-kept filing cabinet, had been the springboard of his two previous escapes and had he not been baulked by the sea barriers in all directions it is possible that he would have presented himself to the German Consul in Dublin months ago. He had, against all probability, got as far as the Liverpool docks on the last occasion and might have found a ship had not hunger forced him to focus attention upon himself by an act of burglary. Hunger was no immediate problem today but transport was and as he watched the last of the beaters top the slope, he made ready to descend into the valley and search the area for an unwatched car or motor-cycle. He was in no particular hurry and could assess the situation calmly. One way and another Otto von Shratt was a rare bird.
When the cries of the beaters grew faint on the far side of the hill he slipped out of his cleft and made a fast, crouching descent to the edge of the Mere where he was able to disappear again inside a rhododendron clump but continue to observe the track that led to the woodman’s cottage.
The woodman was not there. From his observation post high on the hill he had seen the man summoned into the open by the grey-haired old fellow who seemed to be in command of the detachment. But there was probably a woman around and there was nothing to be gained by inviting her outcry, so he moved very carefully along the fringe of the rhododendrons until he could look right across at the cottage and determine whether or not it was empty. He saw no woman, no movement of any kind within the area, but soon he saw something else on his immediate right that made him bob back into the leafy cave of the fronds. A ponderous man was plodding down the path beside the Mere, glancing left and right as he advanced. He did not look a formidable adversary. He was fat, old and short of wind. His mouth curved upwards in a permanent, rubbery grin. From his dense cover Shratt watched carefully, wondering if he was the laggard of the party over the hill. He was alone and carried a single-barrelled sporting gun of some kind held in the crook of his arm. Otto Shratt, a man destined for high rank in the German Navy, settled down to wait and watch.
III
Henry Pitts had never taken kindly to military discipline. His First World War record was impressive for he served three years in France and had been awarded the Military Medal for gallantry on the liquid slopes of Pilckhem Wood, in 1917. But his sergeant’s stripes in that far-off war tended to come and go so rapidly that even Henry himself was sometimes not always sure of his rank. He was inclined to answer back. He was impassive in advance, imperturbable in retreat and his trench mates had thought of him as invulnerable but he was a man who, like Shratt, preferred to make his own decisions and dismiss directives as ‘bliddy lot o’ rigmarole’. Paul Craddock’s instructions to await the assembly of the reserves had struck him as just this and when his car was returned to him, and no-one else had arrived at the Command Post in Coombe Bay, he elected himself rearguard and told Smut Potter, who was lame, to tell anyone else who turned up to follow at their own convenience. Then, borrowing Smut’s single shot rook-rifle and a box of cartridges, he drove to the point where the cars were parked under guard, climbed the slope, and picked his way down through the timber to the path beside the Mere.
It was quiet and cool down here. Pottering along the shore he almost forgot his purpose in entering the woods and watched a moorhen teaching her chicks to swim inshore of the islet. It was years, he reflected, since he had been down here, for his farm lay at the other end of the estate and the last visit he could recall to this section of the woods was during his courting days, when he had walked the buxom Gloria, long since laid in her Cornish grave, along this very path of a summer evening. The memory of youth suffused him. His rubbery grin expanded as he remembered her half-hearted squawks of protests when he had, as he himself would have put it, ‘rinned up an’ down the scales a time or two’. The filtered sunlight and the chorus of birdsong induced in him a sense of peace and fulfilment, particularly when he reflected that he had already outlived Gloria by a decade and had since married Ellie who had proved a great contrast to Gloria. Half-consciously he compared their merits and de-merits, Gloria’s inclination to nag and her capacity for hard work, Ellie’s amiability, offset by her virtual uselessness as a farmer’s wife when removed from bed or the cooking stove where she was adequate. Luxuriating in his memories he strolled along the path as far as Sam Potter’s cottage and pausing there remembered that Sam kept a barrel of home-brewed cider under his kitchen-sink. The thought increased his sense of well-being exorcising the final traces of Otto Shratt from his mind. He raised his head and bellowed ‘Sam! Where be ’ee, Sam?’ and getting no answer dropped his hand on the catch of the gate in the picket fence.
It was the gate-fastening that set in train everything else that happened in the Valley that afternoon. Had it lifted easily he could have opened the gate without setting aside his rifle. As it was he had to struggle with the rusted tongue of metal and to do this he was obliged to use both hands and a certain amount of force. Sam had not used that gate in years. Behind the cottage was a broken paling and he entered and left his garden via this section.
The gate opened at last and giving Sam another hail Henry went round to the wash-house and through into the scullery. His memory had been accurate. There was Sam’s barrel and when he held a mug to the tap cider gushed out as though eager to be at Henry’s service. It was very good cider indeed, Sam having got the recipe from his gypsy mother, Meg. It was, Henry decided, the best drink in the world on a hot summer afternoon after a walk over an incline of two hundred feet. He had no fears that Sam would resent him helping himself. The Potters were an open-handed lot and Henry’s friendship with Sam went back to Victoria’s reign. He smacked his lips, murmured ‘Here’s to ’ee, Sam’, and drank his second mug. By the time he had half-finished his third it would have taxed his powers of concentration to recall what circumstances had brought him here on a lazy summer’s afternoon. He sat on Sam’s kitchen chair, his weight thrown back, his gumbooted legs thrust forward, savouring and remembering, plucking incidents at random from a crowded past, and then his eye fell on a discarded newspaper and a headline that read, ‘Russians Throw Back Kharkov Attack’. With a mild jolt it brought him back to his duty. He washed the cider mug, put it on the draining-board, and waddled out into the sunshine and round to the front gate. Automatically he reached down for Smut’s rook-rifle. It was gone. There was nothing there but a tall clump of nettles, the topmost leaf dipping slightly under the weight of a cabbage white butterfly.
IV
Otto Shratt began to formulate a new plan before Henry had entered the cottage. In the next few minutes he had all but shaped it, dividing it into stages like a
man planning a long and complicated journey on a miserly budget. With a gun in his hand he did not have to comb the area for unguarded transport. He could ambush any car that came by and force the driver to take him north instead of west, for almost at once he isolated three advantages of an abrupt change of route. In the first place no-one would expect him to double on his tracks and enter a more thickly populated area. In the second place he was familiar with the Liverpool dock area, having skulked in the district for several days during his second escape. Thirdly he was persuaded that his chances of stowing away on an Irish-bound vessel would be far more favourable in the north than in the west.
The key to the revised plan was the gun. In ten seconds flat he was out of his screen, across to the fence and back again. The weapon was not impressive, a .22 rifle with a single shot action but it was loaded and as a persuader it was as good as a Luger or a sub-machine gun. Contemplating it Shratt’s dreams of fame and freedom expanded. He saw himself being driven the length of England by cowed civilians whom he could jettison in lonely stretches of country so that the forces of pursuit, catching up with them one by one, would be frustrated and confused. Petrol might prove a problem—he knew it was strictly rationed—but a gun could be made to produce petrol and food and money and anything else he might need on a sustained cross-country jaunt. With mounting confidence he moved along the margin of the little lake, crossed the main path, and climbed the long, timbered slope of the south-facing ridge where he could look down on a large sprawling house approached by a tree-lined drive and backed by an orchard and a yard. Like the woods the place seemed deserted and the prospects of finding transport there seemed to Shratt promising. He went on down, using the orchard hedgerows for cover.
He had reached the bottom of the orchard that gave on to a kitchen garden when he saw the two-seater turn off the river road and tackle the steep, curving drive. It was an old bull-nosed Morris, driven by a middle-aged woman, and beside the woman sat a boy aged about eight or nine. The car crawled up the incline to the forecourt and stopped. The woman and the boy got out and went into the house. In less than a minute Shratt had sidled round the wall enclosing the stableyard, crossed a laurel patch, and approached the Morris from its offside. A glance confirmed his suspicions. The car had been fitted with a detachable ignition key. This had been removed.
It crossed Otto’s mind then that it might be wiser to move on across country and set up an ambush in a lonelier spot but then he reflected that privately-driven cars were not all that plentiful in wartime England and darkness might fall before a suitable one passed. During the interval all kinds of things might happen. The fat man would report the loss of his rook-rifle. The beaters might turn about and come down through the woods. And all the time his own progress, marked by raided vegetable patches, by footmarks, and the missing weapon, would be plotted on police maps. Viewed in the round it seemed to him that his chances of getting clear of the area in the car were more than even, providing he could get possession of the ignition key and, ideally, some reserve petrol. He decided to explore the petrol situation first. Returning the way he had come he regained the stableyard and poked about among the deserted sheds. It was clearly a day for bonuses. In the second shed was a tractor and beside it stood a two-gallon tin of petrol. He adjusted the rook-rifle under his right armpit keeping a finger on the trigger and carrying the petrol can in his free hand walked up the steps and into the big kitchen at the rear of the house.
Thirza Tremlett, the Craddocks’ nanny for time out of mind and now general factotum in a house deprived of all other domestic staff, was working at the sink. When the latch of the door was lifted she did not even look up, assuming the entrant to be the Squire who always came in this way after parking the tractor or stabling his grey. When Thirza felt a gentle prod in the small of her back she hissed with indignation and half-turned, meeting the steady gaze of a young, thick-set man with short fair hair and a day’s stubble on his suntanned face. She opened her mouth to scream but then closed it again. Something in the way the man looked at her warned her that it would be, wiser not to scream. Instead she gobbled and turned her face away, gripping the edge of the sink to offset a sudden loss of power in her legs.
The young man said, in a foreign accent so strong that she could only just catch his meaning, ‘The lady of the house?’ Nothing more, just those five words spoken as a query.
Thirza pushed herself away from the sink and tottered into the middle of the big room, her hands half-extended as though she had suddenly been deprived of vision. But the rifle barrel was still in close contact with her back and under its gentle pressure she moved through the swing door and into the dim passage beyond, the stranger keeping step with her.
She had heard nothing of escaped German prisoners and did not connect this young man’s presence with the war, supposing him to be either a burglar or a madman. Burglars were exceedingly rare in the Valley but madmen were not.
The Codsall family, over at Four Winds, had produced three madmen in three generations and she had known one of them personally, old Martin Codsall, who had killed his wife with a hay knife, fired his shotgun at the Shallowford stable-boy, and finally hanged himself in one of his own barns. There was nothing to be gained by arguing with a madman and she did not try. She responded, with faltering step, to the pressure of the gun-barrel. Her mouth opening and closing, and her false teeth performing a sympathetic undulatory movement, she led the way across the main hall and down another broader passage to a door that was ajar. She paused here for a moment but the man growled ‘Vorwarts!’ and she went on, pushing the door open with her knee.
Claire Craddock and her youngest son John were at the table having their tea and Claire, facing the door, was the first to see them enter. A second or so later John, his mouth full of cake, turned his head and saw them too.
For a long moment mother and son stared and John’s jaws ceased to champ. Nobody moved and nobody said anything. To an onlooker, glancing in from the terrace, the sunlit room might have contained four figures in a waxworks tableau. Then, grappling with amazement and indignation, Claire stood up and at that precise moment Thirza’s knees buckled and she laid herself full-length on the floor. To Claire the movement had, or seemed to have, a certain grace, as though Thirza was simulating the climax of a ballerina and going through a parody of the dying swan. The young man remained standing on the threshold his glance moving casually about the room. She said, at last, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ and the young man, his face twitching momentarily, replied, ‘I want the keys of the car. The car outside of the house.’
His English, apart from its accent, was near perfect but it was the accent that gave her her first clue. Each word was carefully enunciated, like a student trying to satisfy an oral examiner, and with part of her mind Claire pondered this perfection. It told her that this man was almost certainly a German and there was a logical reason for the guess. Away in a remote attic of her brain she heard again the guttural accents of old Professor Scholtzer who had lived in the Valley before the First War, and had all his windows smashed by a patriotic mob after the German excesses in Belgium in August, 1914. The young man’s ‘w’ and ‘s’s’ reminded her very sharply of the professor whom she had liked, and even more of his big, blond son, who used to ride out with the Sorrel Vale hunt and had been killed early in the war fighting against men like Will Codsall and Smut Potter. She had not heard about the hunt for the escaped prisoner, having driven over to Paxtonbury to collect young John at end of term but now she recalled having passed groups of Home Guardsmen on the main road and the man’s clothes gave the impression that he was attached to some kind of institution. It did not occur to her that he was mad, only that he was some kind of enemy and, to a degree, both dangerous and desperate. She could not recall ever having looked into a pair of eyes that were harder, bluer, or less expressionless. Without another word she picked up her handbag, extracted a bunch of keys and selected one. Holding the bunch
suspended by this key she reached across the table. Thirza lay quite still on the floor, John, his eyes blank with amazement, sat without moving a muscle, his jaws still parted by a mouthful of unmasticated cake.
The Green Gauntlet (A Horseman Riding By) Page 11
