Watcher in the Shadows

by Geoffrey Household

  His farm was only some three miles off, so that he was back at half past five with a cold chicken and a bottle of wine. He had been able to arrange that two traffic patrols, in the course of their normal routine, should cover the roads leading away from the Long Down between nine and midnight and should keep an eye on parked cars. He could not get police to watch the Hernsholt end of the Stoke road as well and had detailed the invaluable Isaac Purvis for this duty – with strict orders not to interfere in any way with the big man in the brown suit and to telephone the police immediately if he appeared to be hurt.

  Ian was going to leave his car in Stoke and walk from there. His movements could be watched from the firs or the stream as far as the badger fortress but no farther. Once he had rounded that tangle of thorn and bramble he could hack his way into it. Rather belatedly I remembered that he was over fifty, and advised him to leave all violent action to me if there had to be any. He replied that he was a hard-working farmer and far fitter than he had been at the end of the war; he guaranteed to carry me any time a hundred yards further than I could carry him. No, his chief objection to the whole plan was that he had to walk across somebody else’s land carrying a gun and couldn’t think of any convincing excuse if he met the owner.

  I ate my chicken and drank half the bottle. A little after seven there was a sharp, freshening shower. I was glad that Ian, farmer or not, was safely tucked into the badger fortress where hardly a drop would penetrate. The evening turned out to be one of gold and grey, innocently English and less glaring than the previous night which stuck in my mind as black and crimson.

  At half past eight I set out and took the field path down from the north, for I was not going to trust myself to the Stoke road. Ian was in position. His field of fire was deadly, but he had made himself a bit too comfortable. The dark hole under dead brambles was obvious as I came along the tiger’s expected line of approach. I bent down a branch and tied it inconspicuously so that the leaves drooped across the mouth of the tunnel.

  Then I went round the end of the badger fortress and, presumably, into full view of my executioner if he had already returned to the firs or to the bridge. The nearest patch of cover on that side gave him a range of a hundred and forty yards. I felt at first a little naked, in spite of being certain that he wouldn’t draw attention to himself by carrying a rifle, and that if he did I should long ago have been found dead in the cottage garden.

  I climbed into the alder and sat still. The sun set, and the world became pearl grey. It was such a familiar world. How many times I had watched my gentle, nervous, little mammals under exactly similar conditions! I heard badger cubs yelping underground that it was time to go out. They stopped that very suddenly. A sharp nip from mother had probably impressed upon them that there were two smelly boots down the back door and that long and careful exploration was needed before going out of the front.

  Partridges called from the tussocky grass behind me. A Little Owl landed on the hawthorn opposite with what was probably a shrew in his talons. That was the only sign of any violence at all in the hunting dusk. Cows had been let into the field across the stream since the afternoon, and slowly shifted their groupings as they tore at and chewed – most peaceful of sounds – a last bite of the rich grass along the water.

  There was no moon, and under the overcast sky the light faded early. I no longer fussed about the range of a hundred and forty yards; what began to matter was how much we two enemies could see at ten. The stream and its boggy edges protected my front. Out to my right there was featureless meadow upon which anything which moved could be spotted. Behind me was rough grass on a slight but uneven slope, terraced and pitted by the paths of sheep and cattle through the winter mud. I felt confident that my trained ears would hear anyone who tried to move over this; and anyway it was partly covered by Ian. To my left and overshadowing me was the black bulk of the badger fortress which smothered all possibility of seeing and listening. The darker it got, the more certain I became that my assassin could not miss the opportunity I had arranged for him and that the trap would work. From moment to moment I expected to hear Ian’s challenge and shot.

  The tiger was leaving it late. I wondered again how much he knew of naturalists. In the unlikely event of a badger leaving the sett on my side I would only have seen his streak of white. There was no conceivable point in staying up in the alder unless I intended to take flashlight photographs. And I was not carrying a camera.

  For distraction I gave the badgers some of my attention. One had possibly crossed the stream and was keeping his usual obstinate course, for a cow blew hard and moved away. That aroused a question in my mind, but thereafter the movements of the cattle were perfectly natural. I could hear the tearing gradually die away as one by one they lay down. Two or three followed the course of the stream and I could just see the black bulks across the water. Out of sight, immediately below the fortress, another squelched through the boggy ground, then passed across my front and vanished.

  After that there was absolute silence. I heard Ian cautiously change position. I knew what the faint crackle was, but the tiger could not possibly know – if, that is, he were anywhere near and not enjoying his after-dinner coffee miles away or waiting for me at the Warren. I decided that I had finished with that cottage. It was a good base for attack if the enemy had given me plenty of time to observe him and his ways, but it was hopeless for defence.

  I began to feel drowsy and changed position. It did not matter how much noise I made except from the point of view of putting on a convincing act. The muscles beneath my thighs were sore and painful from resting across a narrow branch, so I drew up my feet and squatted knee to chin. From a distance I must have looked like a bulky, shapeless bird roosting dangerously close to the ground.

  It was that movement which saved me. Out of the tail end of my eye I saw the silhouette of the lower end of the badger fortress harden, detach itself and charge. There might have been just time to shoot, but shooting had never been in my mind. From my coiled-spring squat I sailed into the air out of the alder and came down feet foremost on to the great dome of thorn and bramble like Brer Rabbit hitting the briar patch. I sank up to my chest, for the moment not noticing at all the little furies of thorns. I thought I was a better target than ever, but I cannot have been. The longer stems of hawthorn opposite my face must have masked me, though I could see clearly through them.

  Ian yelled and struggled to get out of his tunnel. The big, dim figure under the alder jumped back, evidently startled that there was another person present. In half a dozen strides he had merged himself again with the darkness at the lower end of the badger fortress, where he seemed to hesitate. Then I heard him splosh across the stream. I just had time and enough sense to whisper to Ian, who was three-quarters out of his hole, that he should talk loudly about frightening the badgers and ask me what the hell I thought I was doing.

  It took me a painful ten minutes to extricate myself with the aid of the clippers. I couldn’t go up, and I could only sink down by degrees. When at last I was standing on earth, striped all over by superficial scratches, I had to go out feet first by way of Ian’s hole.

  Why the tiger should have mistrusted the obvious and expected line of approach I did not then know, but I was on the right lines when I wondered how much he had seen of naturalists and their ways. How he had come up was clear. He had very slowly and cautiously moved among the cows, never startling them but gradually shifting them down to the water. That, as Ian pointed out, was not so easy. It was another slight indication that Isaac Purvis’s gentleman really did own or farm land.

  When one of the cows was squelching through the soft ground he had crossed the stream under cover of its steps and landed on a small patch at the south-east corner of the fortress which was clear of bushes and hidden from the alder. I had entirely overlooked that vital, little sector of turf. Even if there had been cows in the meadow during the afternoon, I am sure that its po
ssibilities would never have occurred to me.

  Once safely across he had waited some time to make out my outline. The whole length of the badger fortress was too long a range for a pistol at night. He may have raised and lowered it half a dozen times before deciding that he couldn’t afford the risk of missing. When I shifted my legs he thought that I was off home and that his opportunity would be lost. So he charged in. I had no time to drop out of the tree and start running.

  While we were looking for his footprints in the mud we came across a charred patch of dead bramble on the edge of the stream where the leaf dust was still smouldering. There was only one conceivable explanation of this. He had stopped for a moment in his escape to light a scrap of paper from his pocket and push it into the dry debris. It didn’t work. If he had had time and a newspaper it would have worked. The wind was right. The dead bramble and the old, dry badger-bedding would have gone up and consumed the whole fortress in one roar of flame while I was still stuck in it. Such concentration of cruelty and hatred left us both shaken. I don’t think he could have been inspired to fire the bramble on the spur of the moment. I have no doubt at all that he had planned that end for me during the afternoon. A crippling, not a killing shot. Then tie my feet and heave me into the bush. Then light the debris at leisure.

  ‘Still about, do you think?’ Ian asked.

  ‘No. He can’t tell what may be closing in ahead of him. By God, I hope the police pick him up!’

  ‘At any rate we have enough evidence now.’

  But had we? Yes, provided there were good grounds for connecting him with my suburb and the postman, and provided that German police, a day or two later, could prove his presence in Germany at the time of the three executions. Ourselves, we could not prove much. Suppose he claimed that he, too, was interested in badger setts? Suppose he apologized for disturbing us and said that for some unknown reason I seemed very nervous? He could be quite convincing if he had a good excuse for staying in the neighbourhood.

  ‘We shan’t hear of him again for some time if he gets clear,’ Ian said.

  That was true enough. I hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry. It meant that the initiative had once more passed to the tiger and that I should have to start all over again.

  I went home with Ian, thankful that he was a bachelor and that I did not have to do any explaining. His reason for never marrying was, I think, not very different from my own – too occupied during the war by the terrible strain of protecting and sometimes sacrificing his agents, and after that too occupied by a sense of guilt.

  The police had nothing to report – no man on foot, no parked car on any of the roads leading away from the Long Down. Ian’s friend, the Chief Constable, evidently thought that hunches were better left to Scotland Yard.

  Isaac Purvis had done rather better by leaning on a cousin’s garden fence and quietly ruminating. At half past ten the dark gentleman had passed him, walking quite casually. On reaching the outskirts of Hernsholt he had turned right, away from the village, which made it pretty certain that he was aiming for the safe, deserted expanse of the Long Down and intended to reach it by the path which led round the bottom of my garden.

  I slept late on that Friday morning and lay in bed wondering how far pride and shame – in my case difficult to distinguish – had been responsible for this single-handed attempt to protect myself. Yet I had so nearly succeeded. By this move to the country, by the selection of my own ground for the trap and the placing and baiting of it I had come nearer to identifying the assassin than ever could have been done by policemen. And though I had failed I was no worse off than before.

  Ian had gone off to Towcester to buy some beef calves, so before lunch I dropped into the Haunch of Mutton, partly to feel a tranquil human society around me, partly to keep in touch with Ferrin.

  ‘You’d be more comfortable in the saloon,’ he said. ‘You look tired.’

  My intelligence was sluggish. I saw no reason why I should be treated as if I were some highly respectable old lady who might not like to take her drink in the public bar. But I obediently followed my beer and the landlord into the so-called saloon – a small room with a table and four prim chairs, vases of artificial flowers on the mantel-piece, and between them a brewer’s calendar displaying a bashful young woman in highly improbable underclothing.

  ‘You’ll be more private in here,’ Ferrin insisted. ‘If I can get hold of him, there’s someone who might want to talk to you. And then again he might not.’

  In a quarter of an hour he returned with an earthy little man whose walk and manner suggested the farm hand, but whose sharp features and sturdy market-town clothes were more in keeping with a small cattle-dealer or auctioneers’ clerk.

  ‘This is Jim Melton. Jim, this is the professor,’ said Ferrin, setting down Melton’s stiff whisky alongside my tankard. ‘You ring the bell if you want anything.’

  I offered a cigarette and kept the conversation going on the weather and the state of the hay crop until I felt that the conventions of southern English politeness had been satisfied. Then I ventured to say that Colonel Parrow had been looking for him the day before.

  ‘Comes the colonel over me,’ said Jim Melton obscurely.

  I suggested that it was just an army habit and didn’t mean anything.

  ‘That’s what I say. Don’t mean a thing! Thursday week, ’alf past three, Mr Melton. How’s a busy man like me to know where he’s going to be Thursday week? Now Ferrin here is different. Whenever you’re passing, Jim, he says.’

  ‘The Haunch of Mutton is your business address?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes and no. Depends on the business. But I’m always glad to oblige Mr Ferrin – especially as he tells me the rozzers would like to know all you know, perfesser.’

  It was plain that Ferrin had all the virtues of a second-in-command. He took his chief’s instructions and dryly dolled them up to suit the taste of the recipient.

  ‘Not that I’ve anything against rozzers,’ Jim Melton went on. ‘We pays ’em, don’t we? That’s what I says to our little fellow last week when he serves me a summons. It’s what I pays yer to do, Jack, I says. But you’re wrong as usual.’

  ‘And was he?’

  ‘He’s no fool, Jack,’ replied Jim Melton non-committally. ‘But he don’t know his law like I do.’

  I rang the bell and had our glasses refilled. Mr Melton was silent for a while, carefully observing me with side-long glances which were no more impolite than those of a bird.

  ‘If Ferrin hadn’t told me as you were a perfesser,’ he said, ‘I’d take my oath you was a gamekeeper, every bit of you.’

  I chuckled at his acuteness and explained what I really was – neither one nor the other but a bit of both. Then I remembered that Ian or Ferrin had been serving out science fiction to that old soldier, Isaac Purvis.

  ‘Blood count of the smaller mammals is what I am working on,’ I said mysteriously. ‘Fission products in the milk are not clear enough evidence.’

  Jim Melton, to my surprise, seemed to know what I was talking about – which was more than I did myself.

  ‘It was them atom bombs which put an end to the rabbits,’ he said. ‘Myxomatosis they calls it, and what I says is: it comes from all them atom products fallin’ down their floppy ear’oles. I ought to get compensation. Trappin’ was one of my businesses.’

  ‘Well, I suppose you can still find a bit of sport?’

  Mr Melton looked shocked, but surrendered when he saw that I was not.

  ‘I can,’ he admitted. ‘But I only tells you that, mind, to give you confidence. And I don’t hold with them dirty gangs from London what clears out all the pheasants in one night. I’m a reasonable man. One for the pot, and one for my expenses.’

  I rang the bell for Ferrin again. I have always respected the sporting, single-handed poacher and employed him if he were employable at all. Jim Melto
n was a useful ally.

  ‘Heard of Fred Gorble?’ he asked, when more drinks were on the table.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fred ain’t too careful what he buys, see? Lives in a caravan on a bit of woodland of his own, with some old farm buildings and no proper road to ’em. I puts some honest business his way from time to time, which makes a nice change for him.

  ‘Tuesday night I was up there to tell ’im about a load of old iron what he might have a use for when I sees a ’orse in the stable what I wasn’t meant to see. Tidy ’orse that, I says. Not mine, says he. Whose is it, I asks, for I knows an old girl out Blixworth way what’s looking for a quiet ’orse up to her weight. You forget about that ’orse, Jim, he says – you ain’t seen it.

  ‘Well, I thinks, that ’orse is a ’unter if ever I see one, but what’s he up to with a ’unter in the flat season? If it had been winter, I’d have known he was keeping it till the dye wore off. So I thinks, what’s in this for me? Just as you would yourself. And when I says good-bye to Fred, I don’t go far but slips round the back of the wood, like. I watches him looking for me, ’alf-’earted, but he soon gives up his suspicions.

  ‘Now, this is what I sees, and I wouldn’t think nothing of it if Ferrin hadn’t said you was a friend of his and that you weren’t trustin’ the rozzers to tell you all they knows any more than you want to tell them all you knows.

  ‘Bloke comes along about ’alf past nine and goes into Fred’s from the back. Changes into boots and breeches and bowler ’at and then goes off on the ’orse. Funny time for hackin’, I thinks. And that’s all I knows.’

  ‘When you saw him go into Gorble’s from the back,’ I asked, ‘could he have been coming from the Long Down?’