Watcher in the Shadows

by Geoffrey Household

  ‘I cannot help there,’ he said. The police require very good reasons before they will issue a certificate. You’ll have to convince them that your life is in danger.’

  I impressed it on him again that I was not going to convince the police of anything nor explain to them my past. We argued it all out once more.

  At last and rather coldly he declared:

  ‘Very well. I have to admit that this is probably the best way of catching the man. But I can’t be mixed up in it beyond a point. Do you realize that if you are caught with a pistol you will be very heavily fined and there will be exhaustive enquiries where you got it from?’

  That seemed to me a comically minor risk. Ian had reverted very thoroughly to civilian legality and probably hoped – by God, I could understand it! – that he would never hear of any of his disquieting wartime friends again. Still, he could have used his influence somewhere to obtain an automatic for me. But did he understand, in spite of his goat and man-eater, how close the parallel really was? Perhaps he didn’t. He was thinking in terms of a police decoy for catching bag-snatchers in the Park.

  That was all. I left Singleton Court – as a matter of principle – by way of the basement and the dustbins, and came out into Gloucester Road. I felt a little more lonely than when I went in – which was most unfair to Ian but may not have been bad for me. Loneliness was a challenge. It shifted my thinking into a gear remembered but long unused.

  The question of an arm. To acquire one illegally was a test of how fit I still was to protect myself. I knew no more of criminal society than any other respectable citizen. The fellows who held up bank cashiers must get their weapons somewhere, but the newspapers did not tell us how.

  What to wear. A dirty lounge suit, bought cheap and off the peg just after the war, seemed right. A turtle-neck sweater under it was at any rate non-committal. I could not leave the house in them since Georgina’s curiosity might be aroused. So I carried the clothes in a brown paper parcel and changed in a public lavatory.

  My destination was Soho. After wandering around to find a café where the customers were neither too young nor too exclusively Italian, I entered a revolting joint just off Wardour Street and sat down, speaking just enough broken English to order a cup of coffee. After ten minutes two scruffy individuals, with a show of heartiness towards the foreigner, got into conversation with me and found that I spoke only German. They cleared off soon and sent me a German-speaking lady of the town. She was a hard-faced, rubbery creature of the type to betray her own mother for money. I pretended to be much taken with her and assured her we would have a wonderful time if only I could sell – I swore her to secrecy – if only I could sell a Luger.

  The following afternoon I was there again. She introduced me to a large and slimy crook who was an obvious copper’s nark. He may have had a police card in his pocket or merely have been in police pay. I don’t know. And, to be fair, I suppose he might have been entirely convincing to anyone without a sense of smell trained to spot his type. He was living proof that I was wise to undertake my own protection. If I could smell police, so could my enemy. God knew what the tiger’s past had been, but it was safe to assume that he had experience of an underground more deadly than that of London Transport.

  My hard-working female friend acted as interpreter. She was disappointed when I denied all knowledge of any Luger. No doubt she had reckoned that a sure couple of quid from the police was a lot better than a mere promise from me.

  When the nark had gone she took me to another café where I was inspected from various angles and kitchen doors. There was a good deal of mysterious coming and going – Harry fetching Alf, and Alf knowing where Jim might be and so forth. It struck me that in criminal circles far too many people are expected to keep secrets. At last and in a third café I met the genuine buyer. He could have been anything from a bookmaker’s runner to a bus conductor. The only quality which one could sense in all that neutral smoothness was contempt for the public.

  How was the Luger to be handed over? I put on a show of fear and suspicion, and insisted on a quiet spot where there was no chance of being arrested by the police or set upon by a gang. The rubber lady assisted with a most incompetent translation and made me appear even stupider than the naïve, self-confident type of German crook which I was playing. It was perfectly clear to any person of normal intelligence – and he had plenty – that when he brought the money I intended to hold him up with the Luger and grab it. We arranged a meeting at ten thirty when it would be dark. Cutie was to take me to the rendezvous. He explained to her at length where it was – a bombed site off Haverstock Hill.

  I telephoned to Georgina that I should be home late and bought her a box of chocolates of about the right size to hold a Luger. Then I had some dinner and afterwards picked up my cinematically bosomed sweetheart. I was glad to see that she had been instructed to take me discreetly to Haverstock Hill by bus, not by traceable taxi.

  She showed me the bombed site and said she would wait for me. I watched her scuttling off as soon as she believed she was out of sight. It all seemed to be going very well, though I could foresee complications if the buyer brought a companion. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t. His own gun – of course I was praying all the time that he had one – should be quite enough to intimidate me.

  I waited for him a quarter of an hour, feeling his presence and once hearing him, while he sensibly satisfied himself that I was alone. After that it was all very quick. He held me up straight away and ordered me to drop my parcel. I whined with surprise and terror. It was quite unnecessary for him to tell me what he would do if I raised my voice. He was most disappointed that the likely box contained only chocolates and came for me, as so many men do when they have lost their tempers, carelessly waving his gun about. I had expected it would be more difficult.

  But I really did congratulate myself on finesse – until, that is, I examined his automatic. It was a miserable Italian .22, accurate enough for killing but with no stopping power at all. However, it would have to do. I shifted him into the shadow of a wall where he was unlikely to be noticed until he came round, replaced the lid on the box of chocolates and returned to my suburb and my aunt.

  2

  Sprung Trap

  I looked out of the bedroom window of the cottage which Ian had found for me with a rising of spirits that I had not felt for years. Not that the scene was in any way unfamiliar; during many months of field work on the smaller mammals I generally rented a room from some kindly old body who was prepared to make my bed and produce simple meals at irregular intervals. The cause of my temporary content was probably relief at being clear of London.

  My vulnerability had been getting on my nerves. There was one duty which I hated: attending as a principal witness the inquest on the postman. Since time and place were public knowledge, my presence was detestably dangerous. It did have one advantage. If my follower was among the public or idly – possibly hopefully – watching from a side street, he could satisfy himself that I was in no way guarded and would feel more free to ask questions.

  Both Ian and I felt certain that he would not try to trace me by writing a letter. If I were submitting to the police all letters from unknown correspondents, he would give some clue, however slight, to the postman’s murderer for the laboratories to work on.

  But he could risk telephoning to Georgina or the Museum or a few other obvious places to ask for my address. None of them had it. I told them all that I had not yet decided exactly where I should be staying and would let them know later. That would look to him as if I had hidden myself or perhaps as if the police had hidden me.

  What would he do then? Ask discreet questions. Try the milkman, for example. No luck. The firm of builders repairing the damage? That wouldn’t do him any good either. I had made a point of telling the chief clerk that the firm could get in touch with me at any time through the Museum.

  What about the p
lasterer, painter and carpenter working on the house? It was an obvious place for the police to plant an agent. He’d have to be careful with them. Still, if he were patient and prepared to watch the men home he could be pretty sure that they were what they appeared to be. When at last he risked a question, it would give him what he wanted to know. In a great hurry on leaving the house and pretending to be nervous about gutters and the horrid little portico over the front door I had made a disastrous slip and given the carpenter my real address.

  It would take time to pick up the clue; but I counted on the care and patience with which he had arranged the execution of Hans Weber. I reckoned that he would spend at least a couple of weeks in finding out the address, arranging a base for himself and avoiding possible traps. Meanwhile I could familiarize myself with the country and watch badgers.

  The cottage which Ian had rented for me was in North Buckinghamshire, in the parish of Hernsholt and about a mile from the village. Far away to the north and east stretched the blue-hazed plain of the south Midlands – elm and oak as far as the eye could reach.

  It was in fact fairly open pasture neatly and thickly hedged, with only a few small coverts where foxes bred under the clatter of wood pigeons; but seldom were there fifty yards of hedge without a great tree. Seen over distance, as from my bedroom window, England seemed to have returned to the temperate forest out of which the Saxons cut and cultivated their holdings. I felt a deeper sympathy for that solid race of pioneers – because I too was still searching for home – than most native English. They have a romantic passion for the still older strains in their ancestry.

  The cottage was known as the Warren. It belonged to a widow who had gone out to stay with a son in Australia, and was still ladylike even when I had packed away all breakable ornaments. It had electricity, a telephone and a water supply piped from a spring at the back.

  Around the spring was a copse of willows. It gave little real cover except at night, but I did not care for it until my eyes were accustomed to its light and shadow. In front of the cottage was a half acre of overgrown garden and, beyond it, the Long Down – a stretch of well-drained upland which had been an airfield during the war. The desolate concrete runways, the air raid shelters and the aircraft bays were still there. Over and among them sheep and cattle pastured.

  Though it was only fifty miles from London my retreat gave such an impression of quiet remoteness that I began to doubt whether the goat could be found. An address written in a casual workman’s notebook seemed a slender connexion with me. Yet it was certain that the tiger would haunt my suburb and finally risk approaching the empty house when every other line of enquiry had failed. When he followed me he should be noticeable. The district was without holidaymakers to confuse the issue. There was nothing to do but farm, breed horses, or fatten cattle.

  I spent the first few days completing a fast and thorough reconnaissance of my surroundings. I made no mystery of myself – and the badgers were there in plenty to account for my movements. I decided to have no observable communication with Ian, not even by telephone. His formidable past was too widely known. I wanted to appear friendless and unprotected to any investigator.

  We did, however, have an optional rendezvous at a bridge over the slow Claydon Brook on Ian’s normal road to and from Buckingham. At four every afternoon he proposed to drive across it. In the stream was a willow snag which he could see from his car. If it had its usual trailer of dead water weed all was well and there was nothing to report. If it was clear of weeds I was waiting close by for an opportunity to talk.

  That Wednesday morning, the fifth since my arrival, was a perfection of English early summer. The new leaves of the great pear-shaped trees which closed the horizon hung motionless, awaiting the first trial of heat. After coffee and bacon I idled in the garden, feeling inclined to take a hoe and discourage the weeds like a good tenant instead of doing a third exploration of the Long Down.

  The Long Down was important. It would be my main line of communication as soon as there was any suspicious sign of interest in me. I was certainly not going to risk the lane which led to my cottage, bordered by thick hedges on both sides. But moving across the disused airfield I could always be sure that I was not followed; and if I had reason to think I was I could vanish among the aircraft bays and the low brick foundations, overgrown by brambles, where huts had once been. It would be impossible to tell by what path I intended to leave the down or whether I had not already left it.

  I decided to weed. I wanted to discourage the dog. It belonged, I was told, to some feckless woman on the far side of the Long Down who worked in a factory at Wolverton and might or might not return home at night. She left the animal outside her cottage with a dirty plate of bread and stale canned dog food. No one would have been surprised if she had expected it to open the cans. The dog spent its days on the down, pouncing disconsolately on beetles, and was delighted to find a companion with nothing obvious and agricultural to do.

  I might as well have reconnoitred my territory waving a red flag as followed by this unavoidable dog which had the bounce of a terrier and the reproachful affection of a spaniel, both very evidently among its ancestors. It was not trainable. Even if it had been, no dog – except a poacher’s lurcher – can move as silently as a man.

  So I spent that gently blazing morning in the garden, and in the afternoon took a bus to Bletchley. I wanted to familiarize myself with the likely routes to and from the station. My very vaguely formed picture of the enemy’s character suggested that he might avoid the risk of car number plates, whether true or false, and use the railway. In any case he would soon find out that I avoided roads and that in following my movements between the cottage and the badgers a car was no help. I myself would have liked to borrow one; but I had no car in London – both Georgina and I with our limited incomes preferred wine to petrol – and it might have appeared unnatural suddenly to have private transport at my disposal in the country.

  I did my shopping in Bletchley and returned to the cottage with veal cutlets, new potatoes and peas. Then, feeling the need of human society with which to share my thirst and the beauty of the evening, I strolled up the lane to my village of Hernsholt and entered the Haunch of Mutton.

  Ferrin, the landlord, was alone. He was a thin, ironical man in his early fifties with an air of knowing the utter worthlessness of humanity and enjoying it all the same. He was generally smiling and silent, but occasionally produced a comment as devastating as that of some nihilistic cartoonist. The habit was good for trade. Local customers would sit over a second drink in the hope of being shocked by whatever Mr Ferrin might say next.

  He served me with a long whisky and soda, and watched me till the glass was nearly empty.

  ‘Like it down here?’ he asked.

  I said I did, and that it was a peaceful spot.

  ‘Too peaceful for business.’

  ‘They watch the telly instead, I suppose?’

  ‘That won’t last long,’ he said. ‘But they’ll soon find something else to stop ’em thinking. It’s all up with the pubs and the churches. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear of a take-over bid from one or the other any day now.’

  I replied that I didn’t much care which admirable tradition ran the other so long as it wasn’t the popular press. That seemed to please him, but he still returned to probing me.

  ‘My father used to swear there was nothing like a badger ham. You’d be all against that, I expect?’

  ‘Not a bit. But I shouldn’t kill in a sett which I was watching. It spoils the fun.’

  ‘Breakfast is breakfast and science is science, like?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Have another on the house,’ he said, refilling my glass without waiting for an answer. ‘You should try the bitter some time. It’s a small brewery and it don’t put water in the beer to pay for the advertising. Colonel Parrow is one of the directors. That’s how I come t
o be here.’

  It seemed wise to take advantage of this marvellously oblique approach to my character and my business while we were still alone, though I did not know what story Ian had told him.

  ‘You were under the colonel in the war?’ I asked.

  ‘Not under him and not over him, in a manner of speaking. I was mess sergeant in one of his hush-hush joints. And you’d be surprised what I used to hear once they got into the habit of not stopping talking when I came round with the drinks. But if I’d asked a question they’d have hung me from a parachute and dropped me on Hitler. That’s what I told Isaac Purvis.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Works on the roads for the District Council. You said good morning to him the other day when he was clearing a ditch in Satters Bottom.’

  ‘I remember. A little dried-up chap in his sixties.’

  ‘Seventies, more like. Well, day before yesterday a stranger comes up to him and asks which we called the Nash road. Is that of any interest to you?’

  I have always been sure that if England were ever occupied its people would find the organization of underground cells an almost effortless means of self-expression. On the surface they are so open, and yet so naturally and unconsciously secretive about anything which is of real importance to them.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘But there are four other houses along the Nash road besides my cottage. Was Mr Purvis able to find out which he wanted?’

  ‘No. He couldn’t keep him – though he’s a rare one for conversation. Lucky if you get away after half an hour of the Council’s time! But he noticed the chap didn’t go in to Worralls. And I saw Slade and Parrish last night, and he didn’t go there. So that only leaves you and Mrs Bunn – who never has a visitor, I’d say, but the vicar and the district nurse.’

  ‘What sort of man was he?’