Operation Pax

by Michael Innes

  Kolmak looked at his aunt in surprise. ‘To Bultitude? I suppose I may – though he is not always very approachable.’

  ‘Then tell him about Uncle Nikolaus.’

  ‘About Uncle Nikolaus! But why…’

  ‘It is something that I observed about Mr Bultitude when we spoke together at your Provost’s party. Remember I am a judge of men.’

  Kolmak was uncomprehending. But again he nodded obediently. Then he turned to go.

  ‘Kurt – you are forgetting your robe.’

  ‘My gown, Tantchen.’

  He smiled, kissed her on the brow, picked up the black MA gown from a chair and went out of the room, closing the door behind him. The aeolian harp was still murmuring. He shut the landing window, for the breeze was now chill from the advancing autumn night. The music died away. He peered out, and could just distinguish the tirelessly turning anemometer on the Observatory. But the optical illusion would not work in the dusk.

  Kolmak tiptoed downstairs. A door opened below. One Miss Tinker or the other would be there – perhaps, Kolmak thought, she would be remembering her brother, a young don with a gown over his arm, going out to dine with Walter Pater in Brasenose long ago.

  4

  Routh did not know where his new pursuer had picked him up.

  He had thought of Oxford as a collection of colleges and a row or two of shops, and as a place where everybody went about in a sort of uniform, so that one might be awkwardly conspicuous in ordinary clothes. And he had somewhere read that there were officials of the University who might stop you in the street and ask your business, and who had the power to turn you out of the place if they didn’t like you. He wished he had got to Reading, which was the sort of town he earned his living in and understood.

  But the bus station reassured and comforted him. There was the sort of crowd in which no one could look at him twice. All the same, London would be better. He might get a long-distance bus from this very spot. He could get off as soon as it reached the network of the Metropolitan Railway – at Edgware, say, or Hendon. After that, and barring extreme ill luck, his safety would be absolute. There were half a dozen places where he could confidently go to earth.

  First, though, he must get something to eat. He had been through more than any man could sustain on a couple of sausage rolls. If he had had something solid inside him he would never have let his fancy run away with him over those two nuns. Routh looked about him and felt that, except for his empty stomach, he was master of himself. He went over to an inquiry office and learnt that there was a coach to London in an hour. At the corner of the bus station he found a pub that was just right for him – unpretentious but putting on a square meal. He forced himself to eat slowly, and he drank no more than half a pint of bitter. Nothing had ever tasted so good, and as its warmth coursed through him his mind found release from its late tensions in pleasing fantasies. One of these was particularly satisfying; it presented a vision of Routh rubbing Squire’s face savagely and repeatedly in gravel. But presently Squire’s head turned into a lion’s, and Routh was constrained to believe that he had been dreaming. For a moment of panic he thought he might even have missed his bus. His watch, however, reassured him that it could have been no more than a five minutes’ nap. He paid his bill and went out.

  He was still sleepy. The evening air had turned chill, so that he shivered. But it quite failed to wake him up. He looked around him, heavy-eyed. The broad expanse of Gloucester Green was now much less crowded, and his glance fell on a man standing near the middle of it and looked towards him. Routh had seen the man before; had seen him just as he got off the bus from Abingdon. There could be no mistake. The man was foreign-looking and noticeable. But of course it might be pure chance that he was still hanging about. Perhaps he too happened to be waiting for the London coach.

  At least he could put the thing to test at once. He walked off and turned a corner. The façade of a cinema, islanded between two streets, was now before him. He rounded this, as if to stare idly at the posters with which the farther side of the building was plastered. And out of the corner of his eye he saw the foreign-looking man, now affecting to peer into the window of a confectioner’s shop across the street.

  Routh turned, and this time walked away as rapidly as he could. When he had gone fifty yards he looked over his shoulder. The man was just behind him.

  Routh knew very well what he ought to do. He was still on the fringe of the bus station, which showed no sign of becoming denuded of drivers, conductors, policemen and substantial numbers of the public. He ought to stand his ground, get on his bus when it came in, and travel on it, as he had planned, to London. There, still moving with a crowd, he would get himself a taxi and vanish. But Routh, as all this revolved itself in his head, walked on. He knew he was being a fool. He knew that he was allowing himself to be driven off his own best line of retreat. But he was powerless to stop and stand. And suddenly the truth of his own position came to him. He was on the run.

  They had got him on the run. The battle, essentially, was a battle of nerves – and he was losing. His mind flashed back over the afternoon and he saw the shocking significance of the clean break he had managed to make in the prefab, and in the bus blindly boarded for an unknown destination. If they pick-up so swiftly after a check like that, if they could be on top of him like this the moment he set foot down in Oxford, his defeat seemed fated. They were invincible.

  And once more the symptoms of fear began to operate upon Routh’s body. The last enemy, he knew, would be sheer fatalism; would be a disposition to turn flat round and walk limply into his enemies’ hands. Gloucester Green was now a nightmare to him, and he turned sharp out of it through the first means offering – a lane that narrowed before him and turned into a mere footpath between commercial buildings. From in front came a hum of traffic on what he guessed must be a principal street of the city. If he could dash out there and swing himself upon a moving bus…

  He broke into a run, swerved between two women who were approaching each other with perambulators, and was on the street. There was only one bus. It was stationary. But the last of what had been a line of passengers were boarding it, and in a moment it would be moving. Routh glanced behind him. His pursuer was hard upon him, but seemed to be momentarily entangled with the prams. Routh ran for the bus and jumped on. As it moved off the foreign-looking man emerged and jumped for it too, but missed and fell. For a moment Routh had the happiness of looking down at him malignantly in the dust. Then the conductress pushed him off the platform and he tumbled into a seat just in inside. For the second time within a couple of hours he was trundled off for an unknown destination.

  Routh closed his eyes, the better to take stock of his situation. That he had once more shaken off his relentless pursuers seemed too good to be true. Nevertheless it was a fact. The foreign-looking man could hardly have had a car in waiting; otherwise he would surely have taken up the chase in it instead of jumping for the bus. So at the worst Routh had five or ten minutes start. It was not much, but if he used it cleverly it would yet save him. And suddenly he knew what he would do. He would make no attempt to get back into the centre of Oxford. Rather he would keep a lookout for a suburban garage – the kind that is almost certain to have a car or two for hire. He would go in, take care to keep out of observation from the road, and ask for a car to take him straight out of Oxford. Hiring a car would be expensive, but he had the money and a bit over in his pocket, and it would be worth it. With his eyes still closed, Routh put his hand to his breast pocket to feel the wallet in which he kept all his cash.

  He seemed to go dead cold all over. The wallet was gone. He must have left it behind him when he emerged so sleepily from the pub where he had fed. There was nothing left in the pocket except the thin fold of paper that was Formula Ten. He had not even the twopence that would buy him a ticket on this bus.

  Routh opened his eyes again. Planted opposite to him was Squire.

  5

  The double shock w
as too great. Routh gave a strangled cry. The effect of this was unexpected. Somebody sitting next to him took his hand and shook it warmly. And from out of a great darkness he heard himself addressed in a high and quavering voice. ‘My dear Carrington-Crawley, how delightful of you to recognize me!’

  The momentary blackout cleared, and Routh saw Squire leaning forward to listen, and at the same time gazing at him stonily. His hand was still being shaken – with surprising vigour in view of the fact that the person concerned had all the appearance of a centenarian. A second before, Routh had felt that he would never be capable of intelligent utterance again. But now words came to him from nowhere. ‘But of course I recognized you, sir! In fact I was keeping a look out for you.’

  The centenarian gave a crow of delight. He had a spreading white beard, and his only other distinguishable feature was a pair of bright eyes twinkling behind steel-rimmed glasses. ‘Splendid – splendid, my dear Carrington-Crawley! Perhaps you even might have time to pay a call?’

  Routh took a deep breath. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That is just what I was on my way to do.’

  At this the centenarian crowed again, dived into a pocket, and produced a shilling which he flourished in the air before him. ‘My man,’ he cried to the conductress, ‘two fares, if you please, to Rawlinson Road.’

  Routh took a sidelong glance at the centenarian, who was now counting his change. Presumably he was a professor, and in that case Carrington-Crawley had perhaps been one of his students. Anyway, that would be the best guess upon which to proceed. But Routh had the wit to realize that it was little use his calculating and planning the right things to say. He knew far too little about the ways of this place for that. He must simply proceed on impulse, and trust to the result’s being as happy as his first two utterances had been. And impulse now prompted him to take the lead. ‘By jove, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s a great many years since we met.’

  The centenarian nodded vigorously. ‘My dear boy,’ he chirruped, ‘I think I am enjoying my years of retirement. I think I know how to use them – to use them, I say, my dear boy – to use them!’

  ‘I’m quite certain that you do.’

  ‘But I look back on my final few years of teaching with particular pleasure, particular pleasure, particular pleasure. I look back on them with particular pleasure, I say.’

  Routh wondered how much the old man was really off his rocker. His voice was shrill and commanding, so that several people turned round to glance at him. But none of them appeared to think him anything out of the way. Even the conductress, on being addressed as ‘my man’, had not shown any surprise. Perhaps he was a well-known character about the place. Or perhaps it was just that his sort were the regular thing here.

  ‘And your own year, now – your own year, your own year. Some remarkable men – remarkable men, I say. Todhunter, for example. A most distinguished career – yes, a most distinguished career.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Routh, ‘Todhunter – we all expected it of him.’

  ‘Expected it, you say – expected it, expected it?’ And the repetitive old person turned sideways upon Routh and stared so hard into his face that it appeared inevitable that all must be lost. ‘Expected it?’ The old person’s voice expressed extreme indignation. ‘Expected it of that shocking little drunk?’

  Routh’s heart sank. ‘We thought he had it in him, all the same, sir.’

  ‘You astonish me.’ And the centenarian looked about the bus, as if this announcement ought to be of very general interest. ‘You astonish me, Carrington-Crawley. But, no doubt, you knew each other best, knew each other best…’ The old person’s asseverations died away in a diminuendo, and for some moments he remained silent in what appeared to be a sombre reverie. Routh nerved himself to look again at Squire. The bus was crowded, but he judged it not impossible that his enemy might simply hold it up at the revolver’s point and then hustle him into some high-powered car hovering behind. In that case.

  ‘When did you last see Carrington-Crawley?’

  Routh jumped. ‘Carrington-Crawley?’ he repeated blankly.

  The centenarian nodded impatiently. ‘Carrington-Crawley, I said, Carrington-Crawley. When, my dear Todhunter, did you last see Carrington-Crawley?’

  Routh’s head swam. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said. ‘But it was a good long time ago.’

  ‘Precisely!’ the centenarian was triumphant. ‘Nobody ever sees Carrington-Crawley. Precisely, precisely, precisely.’

  There was a silence in which Routh felt that something further was expected of him on this topic. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘Carrington-Crawley was always a retiring fellow.’

  ‘Retiring?’ The centenarian was momentarily at a loss; then he broke into a ghostly but unrestrained laughter. ‘Very good, Todhunter, my dear boy – very good, very good. Retiring, indeed! Tcha! Disagreeable young poseur that he was! But here we are, we are, we are. Come along, along, along, I say, along.’

  At this moment, and while Routh’s ancient friend was preparing to hoist himself to his feet, Squire acted. The seats facing each other at the rear of the bus each had room for three people, and beside Routh a place was now empty. Squire rose, slipped into it, leant across Routh, and addressed the centenarian – and at the same moment Routh felt something hard thrust into his ribs. ‘Excuse me, sir, but you are mistaken in supposing this to be a former pupil of yours. He is, in fact, a friend of mine who has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and we are getting off together at the stop after your own.’

  ‘Rubbish, sir!’ The centenarian had risen to his feet and was regarding Squire with the utmost sternness. ‘Stuff and nonsense! Do you think I don’t know my own old pupils? Do you think I don’t know Rutherford here, of all men – a student who was genuinely interested in the Risorgimento – in the Risorgimento, I say, the Risorgimento?’

  ‘You are quite wrong. My friend is nervously disturbed and extremely suggestible. And his name is certainly not Rutherford.’

  The bus was slowing to a stop. Routh felt what must be Squire’s revolver digging yet harder into his ribs, and he was frozen beyond the power of act or utterance. The centenarian, however, proved to have decided views on how this sort of thing should be met. He raised a gloved hand in front of Squire’s face. ‘Rascal!’ he said. ‘Are my grey hairs – my grey hairs, I say – to be no protection against public impertinence? I pull your nose.’ And suiting the action to his words, he pulled Squire’s nose – so hard that the latter sat back with a yelp of pain, to the considerable surprise of a number of people farther up the bus. ‘And now, my dear Rutherford, off we get?’

  Routh’s ribs appeared to be no longer menaced. He got to his feet, and found it difficult to refrain from clinging literally to the centenarian’s coat-tails – like a child to his mother’s skirts when afraid of being left behind in some frightening place. But as he stepped off the bus his wits were working again. Would Squire follow at once? Had he reinforcements in a car or van just behind? These were practical problems. But Routh also wondered how Squire had found him, and why the foreign-looking man had leapt so desperately if he knew that Squire was on the job.

  The centenarian had set off at a brisk pace down a long suburban road. Routh scanned it anxiously. It was quiet, but not too quiet. Three or four young men in skimpy white shorts and voluminous sweaters and scarves were congregated round a small sports car by the kerb. An elderly man was clipping a hedge. Farther along, a couple of men were high on a telephone pole, leaning back on leather slings as they worked at it with spanners. And scattered here and there were about half a dozen small boys in dark-blue blazers bouncing balls or circling idly round on bicycles. Routh glanced over his shoulder. There was as yet no sign of Squire or any other pursuer. If only he could gain the centenarian’s house before –

  ‘And now about the Risorgimento, Rutherford. What did you think of Count Fosco’s book?’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t read it yet.’

  The centenarian made a disapprovi
ng noise. ‘Keep up your scholarship, Rutherford – your scholarship, I say, your scholarship. Busy as you senior officials at the Treasury always are, you should find time for your purely intellectual interests.’

  Routh declared his intention of reading Count Fosco at the earliest possible moment. It was dawning on him that there were very considerable possibilities in this old man. Although not without abundant vanity, Routh had a tolerably accurate notion both of his own present appearance and of the social stamp he carried permanently about with him. He saw that anyone, however vaguely in contact with the external world, who took him for a senior Treasury official must be pretty far gone. He should have no difficulty, therefore, in continuing to deceive this old fool. There was money, for instance. He now desperately needed that. Well, the old fool probably kept a good deal in the house, and he ought to be able to clear him out of it without difficulty. Unless – and Routh turned to his prospective dupe. ‘Is your household the same as ever, sir?’ he asked. There might well, it had occurred to him, be unmarried daughters, or people of that kind – middle-aged folk still sufficiently in possession of their wits to see at once that there was something wrong.

  ‘Precisely the same, Rutherford. My dear old sister and our dear old housekeeper. My sister is quite blind now, I am sorry to say; and Annie is very frail, very frail. A woman comes in during the morning and does most of the work, yes, most of the work, most of the work.’

  For the first time for many hours Routh allowed himself an evil grin. This was better and better. If he failed to get what he needed by spinning a tale he could very easily clout the three old dotards on the head and take it. He was playing for high stakes, after all, and need not boggle at a broken skull or two. Particularly now that the stars in their courses had declared for him. Ruthless Routh. He looked behind him. There was still no sign of Squire.