No Birds Sang

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘Nobody’s going to fire at it where that lies. Where could he get a sight from? This is going to give the demolition boys a right old head-ache.’

  ‘They’ll have to be told before that lot comes swarming over at stand-to.’

  Kenworthy crouched on his hands and knees and took a very close look.

  ‘Not getting any sudden new ideas, I hope, Simon?’

  ‘Just wondering.’

  ‘Well, let’s go and do our wondering a hundred and fifty yards away.’

  ‘No need for that. Sixty yards is about the normal lethal range, if I remember it. I’m just marvelling how a little thing like that could bugger up our night out.’

  ‘It’ll bugger up Milner’s, if he steps on it without seeing it.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘How do you mean, you doubt it?’

  Kenworthy did not answer, but walked some yards away, to the nearest standing fragment of wall, and looked down over it.

  ‘You’re not thinking of anything, Simon?’

  ‘You go and sit it out in Sally Carver’s living-room, Derek.’

  ‘Like hell! And let you …’

  ‘I’ve just been looking for somewhere to throw it.’

  ‘It’ll go off in your hand if you touch it.’

  ‘It won’t. It can’t. If I can pick it up by the notch in the plunger, it won’t go off till I tell it to—perhaps not even then. If the plunger slips, it’ll either stick again, as it has now, or it will percuss a little rim-fire cartridge. That sets fire to a four-second fuse. And four seconds is a hell of a long time, Derek. It’s all the P.B.I. had in action. And this is probably a training model anyway, which would have seven seconds. That’s an eternity. They didn’t use seven second fuses in battle, because they gave the recipient time to lob the bloody thing back.’

  ‘I’ll not be a party to it, Simon. Anyway, look!’

  He dived and came up with something in his hand.

  ‘The clip. So the split pin must be somewhere in the offing. So it obviously wasn’t thrown here from the prairie. The pin was pulled out here, on this spot.’

  ‘Which a bloke wouldn’t do unless he knew for certain that the thing wasn’t going to go off. Give that to me, Derek.’

  Stammers handed him the curved strip of metal, and in one swoop Kenworthy had the grenade in his hand with the clip back in position and the plunger secure. He began to try to shift the stubborn base-plug.

  ‘Simon! That’s enough, now.’

  ‘It’s not enough. We can’t leave it like this.’

  The plug suddenly yielded to the ball of his thumb.

  ‘As I thought. No detonator. No spring even. No wonder the plunger was loose and—well! damn me! That’s the first time I’ve ever seen one with the filler-screw missing. Derek, this one’s been emptied. No basic charge, even. This is somebody’s souvenir—an empty case. What a very gentlemanly gesture on somebody’s part. But how discouraging it could have been. Darkie Pascoe’s work, do you think?’

  ‘Darkie’s definitely not that kind of gentleman. He’d never have thought of this in ten thousand years. He couldn’t see two moves ahead in any game—even one to save his own skin!’

  ‘Let’s move back into the shadows, then.’ Kenworthy slipped the bomb into his rain-coat pocket. ‘No need to go boasting to Elspeth about this. She wouldn’t strike me any medal. She wouldn’t understand.’

  They moved out to a sheltered point some thirty yards outside the village.

  ‘One thing, Derek, we now know we’re not wasting our time. Somebody else is expecting Milner tonight, somebody who wanted to warn him off, without wishing him any harm.’

  ‘Could be. Sometime soon, we’ve got to get in here by arrangement and start digging in and round that spot.’

  ‘Digging!’ Kenworthy’s enthusiasm was sudden and explosive. ‘That’s it, Derek—digging!’

  ‘That’s what I said, isn’t it? We’ll get the lads out with picks and shovels the moment we can clear it with the army.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. I mean: what Milner saw. A man, two men, a group of men, digging. Looking out of his turret: framed in the same proscenium as the girl at the window: somebody digging. The clank of shovels: that’s what woke the girl: something she heard but couldn’t see, because it was alongside the north wall of the house, where there aren’t any windows.’

  ‘Hidden treasure?’ Derek was sceptical, but his sarcasm was playful.

  ‘Something they were putting away? Something they were retrieving? Loot? Secrets? A corpse? Something they wanted stashed away for the duration? The night this happened, had they already had notice to quit? That’s something you can check, Derek, if you can’t quote it off the cuff. A girl at a window and men digging: something etched into Milner’s retina like a snap from a Polaroid Swinger.’

  Kenworthy was almost breathless in his eagerness. But Derek was too orthodox and cautious to allow himself to be infected. ‘You do push things from simple beginnings, Simon.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You were talking not so long ago about the dangers of imagination. Isn’t the worst of those the illusion of certainty?’

  ‘Maybe. But it’s an illusion worth having a butcher’s at while you’re about it.’

  ‘Is this how you’ve cracked all the big ones, Simon?’

  ‘Pursuing fantasies until there was not a trickle of life’s blood left in them. And developing a thick skin for the moment that they fizzle out. When that happens, you just move on to the next, and do the same with that.’

  ‘Well, I’ve no doubt that in the last ten seconds you’ve taken this one several stages further. Are you ready to reject it yet?’

  ‘Far from it. I see men digging. Three men. The Pascoe brothers. Something their grandma knew about. Something even she didn’t trust. That’s why she warned Darkie off, when Milner came round asking questions.’

  ‘You make things fit, Simon.’

  ‘That’s the moment when I do begin to scent danger, when those about me start agreeing with me.’

  ‘You must lead your sergeants a hell of a dance.’

  ‘Just now and then I’ve suspected one or the other of them of rather enjoying it.’

  Over at the camp a bugler sounded Last Post. It was almost half a mile away, but the sound travelled clearly on the moist air. They heard the crunch of his heels as he marched back to the guard-room.

  Kenworthy went and urinated against a relic of crumbling, overgrown wall. ‘And now I suggest we pipe down. Milner’s an ex-serviceman, and if he’s near enough to have heard that bugle, he’ll not move in until he hears Lights Out.’

  Derek moved some distance away and took cover behind a low coping.

  And whatever the years of mock battle had done to the village, it had not cleared it of wild life. There were still creatures that seemed to have accommodated themselves to the intermittent racket. An owl flew over them, huge wings that dipped only once or twice, without a sound. Nearer at hand Kenworthy heard some much smaller animal: a field-mouse, perhaps, climbing about blades of grass with as much confidence as if they were tubular scaffolding.

  Was your journey really necessary?

  Did men, too, climb obstacles that they could just as easily go round?

  He heard the movement stop. Feeding, perhaps. Nibbling at something. Preening its whiskers.

  The last call of the day came from the camp square, the bottom G deep throated and pure. They weren’t near enough, there were too many trees in the way, to see the lights in the huts go out one by one. But Kenworthy could picture it. He spent half his life picturing things he couldn’t see. Sometimes he was wrong. Often.

  Men digging. The Pascoe brothers.

  The stars were unaffected by military routines. They were cold, with a stereoscopic impression of depth. Sometimes you were aware of it, sometimes not. Tonight Kenworthy was. It was going to be a cold night; a frost perhaps. Poor sods at first light; cold rifle-butts.

  Retr
ieving something? Stashing something away?

  There were other sounds in the over-lapping folds of the night: a dog baying, out on a farm beyond the preserves of the M of D; a cow lowing; a car on a distant high-road, free of radar traps along the dead straight, blowing the guts out of the engine. Nearer, much nearer, a moped, pushed to its last resource at full throttle. People must be anxious to get home tonight; or else to get away. Headlamps played optical tricks through the pine trunks.

  And then the first sound that didn’t belong to the dereliction that was Yarrow Cross. If there were ghosts in the old village, then they preferred the form of furry little animals and dry-winged, blundering moths. But this new sound was no ghost, either. Kenworthy had done his share of night-watching. He knew a human footfall when he heard one, even if it came singly.

  And this one wasn’t coming singly. Its perpetrator was making no more noise than he could help, but he was no born scout. Over towards where an arc of older trees crowded in on the village, towards the eastern edge, Kenworthy heard a man coming through grass. He heard a foot stubbed against a stone. He heard the man stop several times to listen.

  Had Derek heard? Had Derek allowed himself to doze off?

  Kenworthy pushed himself up on his elbows and peered. Looking for what? The indiscreet flash of a torch? A shadow that shouldn’t have moved?

  A twig snapped; or perhaps it didn’t. A stone fell from a loose coping; but that must always be happening, out here, without immediate human agency. A jig-saw of sound, normal and abnormal; Kenworthy struggled to make sense, movement, purpose out of it, knew that he was failing. They must wait.

  Then a hare got up, started from fairly close to where Kenworthy thought he had placed the newcomer, came dashing diagonally across the middle distance like a train up a cutting, shot close to where Kenworthy and Stammers were lying, caught their scent and changed its line of flight at an abrupt angle.

  Milner, if Milner it was, must be standing still, wondering if the animal had given him away. For half a minute there was no sound of his progress. Some other animal—the field-mouse of some minutes ago?—ran over Kenworthy’s foot.

  And then there was a scuffle. Milner had arrived on the stage; and clearly he was not alone. Perhaps his companion had come with him; perhaps he had come earlier and quietly waited for him; perhaps they had arrived simultaneously from different quarters.

  It would come to matter, how they had arrived; but it did not matter now. What did matter was that Milner and his companion apparently no longer thought it necessary to conceal their progress. There was a scuffle: limbs thrashing through the herbiage. A body thumped down on the hard earth, picked himself up again. There were repeated crumps of fists against flesh and bone, the groans and grunts of men putting desperate weight behind their punches.

  One thing was predictable: they were too concentrated on their own problems to be on the look-out for strangers. Kenworthy got to his feet and began to run towards them. Derek read his mind and was no more than a yard and a half behind him.

  When they were within about fifty yards of their objective, one of the men screamed: a horrifying shriek, the howl of a man, as they were to know within less than a minute, who knew that this was death.

  Kenworthy broke into a sprint, cursing the rubber boots, swinging round to his left so that he could come in from a flank. Derek needed no telling to wheel in from the other direction, so that they came down on the stone-flagged yard like the jaws of a pair of calipers.

  One man down on his knee was bending over another, his hat pushed to the back of his head. They knew that stylish felt: it was part and parcel of Edward Milner.

  ‘I’m trying to turn him over. He’s been knifed. I’m trying to get it out of him, but I’m not sure it’s the proper thing. Will it increase the bleeding?’

  The blood smelt so sickly, you could taste it. Milner was kneeling in it, his suit soaked, he did not seem to know. Kenworthy’s hands were tacky with it, he never did recall how he had plunged them into it.

  They got the body on to its belly.

  ‘Never mind, Milner. It makes no difference to him whether you pull it out or leave it where it is. He couldn’t care less.’

  Derek shone the full flush of his torch down on a middle-aged, badly shaved, grime-lined and terrified face.

  ‘Darkie Pascoe,’ he told Kenworthy.

  Chapter Nine

  She sat up in bed, a loose bed-jacket over a translucent nightdress in turquoise nylon; for ever destined, it seemed, to make her crashing first appearances in this sort of attire.

  A hospital in the Home Counties. Past her mid-forties, now, but there was something about that face. That first impact stuck in Kenworthy’s brain as the earlier one had in Milner’s. Vitality; a readiness to burst into laughter; an ebullient enjoyment of the absurd; a picture, ironically, of bounding health.

  ‘You’ll find her,’ the Sister had said. ‘Near the middle on the left. You can’t miss her. She radiates through that ward.’

  ‘And if I’m not mistaken, that’s just about as far from her actual medical condition …’

  ‘We get cases like it. Mercifully. It’s as if there’s some sort of compensation. But she wasn’t always like this. When she first came in here …’

  ‘About four years ago?’

  ‘That’s right. For her first year, we couldn’t get her to try.’

  ‘You’ve done well with her.’

  ‘Not me. However, by all means go and talk to her, only don’t go worrying her.’

  ‘I told you, this is a social call.’

  The Sister seemed on the brink of second thoughts. ‘You’re sure, Mr Kenworthy?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’m on holiday.’

  ‘A busman’s or a Chief Superintendent’s?’

  ‘She interests me. But it’s only a story I’m trying to round off, Sister, not a case.’

  ‘There’s a difference, is there?’

  ‘In your walk of life, too, I would imagine. Don’t you ever get fascinated by someone who’s not a patient?’

  ‘Yes. But I’m not a policeman.’

  As far as Kenworthy was concerned, he was telling the truth. He was out of the case-work. Derek had brow-beaten Milner in the small hours—as near flagrante delicto, he pointed out, as two top coppers had ever surprised a man. It wasn’t a question of finger-prints: he was still holding the knife.

  Milner had strenuously protested his innocence. He had planned a rendezvous with the man they all knew as Darkie Pascoe. Indeed, he was to meet him on the precise spot of the murder and at almost the operative minute.

  How had he come to make such an appointment?

  There was a public telephone in the central concourse of the hospital.

  But he’d have to have an intermediary? Darkie Pascoe wasn’t on the phone.

  Yes. He’d had an intermediary. But his name wouldn’t help, Milner insisted. Relays of detective-sergeants were going to hammer at that for hours.

  Milner had come upon Darkie Pascoe struggling with an unknown assailant. No, it was impossible to offer any description. How could one describe a writhing shadow, wrestling by star-light? Especially when you didn’t know by star-light which was attacking and which attacked?

  And Milner was equally obstinate about his reasons for yet another visit. He had told Dr Menschel; he had told Dr Menschel everything; and that was confidential. Dr Menschel had agreed, it couldn’t help anybody. It couldn’t get Milner off this hook; it couldn’t affect the case in any way; it could only bring untold misery to people who deserved something better. Something that was of no possible interest to the police.

  Just for once in his career, Derek Stammers began wishing that the man would ask for a solicitor: anyone who might possibly try to talk some sense into him.

  Kenworthy went back alone to the murder spot whilst the rest of the posse were moving towards the cars. As well as he could, by torch-light and by shuffling his feet, he searched a fifty yard radius for the sheath in
which the knife must have been carried. He did not find it. And sitting in Derek’s passenger-seat, he insisted, all the way back to headquarters, on its importance.

  It was just the sort of weapon, with a vicious curving blade, that had got itself outlawed during the Mods and Rockers spell.

  ‘He didn’t have it with him when we picked him up yesterday. He certainly didn’t take it with him into the Mental Hospital. And he’s hardly likely to have acquired it while he was in there. And he couldn’t conceivably have carried it cross-country without a sheath.’

  ‘So he flung the sheath behind his back when he drew the blade: further afield than you were able to look. A thing like that might fly a long way, jettisoned in a moment of savage abandon. We’ll find it by daylight.’

  ‘Ministry of Defence permitting.’

  ‘They’ll have to bloody well permit this time. If they won’t for us, we’ve still got MI5 making snide noises.’

  ‘True, but if I were you …’ Kenworthy hesitated. He didn’t want to talk paternalistically to Derek. He would rather withhold advice altogether. But this did matter.

  And Derek looked up with an open face. Elspeth’s kid brother.

  ‘If you don’t find that sheath, Derek, you’ve got to think again.’

  ‘I fancy the D.P. P. will be happy enough without it.’

  ‘Oh, blast the D.P.P. So might a jury be. But will you?’

  Derek was non-committal, and Kenworthy did not blame him for that. For the next hour or so he had a lot to think about.

  Next morning, at breakfast, Derek worn out was just finishing his, and Diana was laying places for Simon and Elspeth, Derek smiled good naturedly.

  ‘Just taken a phone call. We have the sheath. Picked up by the subaltern who led the dawn raid.’

  ‘Congratulations. Sorry I pressed it.’

  ‘Sorry I can’t keep you company today.’

  ‘Understood. Elspeth and I thought of looking up Sally Hammond, nevertheless.’