Watcher in the Shadows

by Geoffrey Household

  After supper Mrs Melton put on a formidable hat, and we went across the kitchen garden to the shed – a store or ammunition hut which Jim had picked up from the army and now served as garage and barn. Its long axis was set obliquely to the cottage and the door faced more or less up the road.

  Inside were piles of useful junk and an incredible vehicle with a shining bonnet – black, powerful, looking as if it were an amateur conversion of one of the royal laudaulettes into a van.

  ‘It’s a ’earse;’ Jim explained. ‘Comes a bit ’ard on petrol. But that’s an income tax expense. I’m a farmer, see? Got more than five acres, I have, here and there.’

  Mr and Mrs Melton got in, and the hearse burst out into the road. It was Jim’s method of entering and leaving his garage and may have accounted for the angle at which he set it. No doubt he compensated for his dislike of military service by imagining himself a cowboy in a hurry or a cavalier carrying news to the king.

  I was left to entertain the Miss Meltons. A shower drove us indoors and limited the amusements I could provide. There was not a book in the house, so we turned to a paintbox. Caricatures of authority in the shape of school teachers and policemen were so popular that for an hour there was silence except for recommendations to make the backside bigger or the nose redder.

  Our peace was broken by the jackdaw’s strident call of greeting. The bird seemed to be acting efficiently as watchdog till the new puppy grew up. One of the Miss Meltons looked out of the front window, but there was nobody about. The rain had just started to pelt down and heavy thunder clouds had brought an early dusk.

  ‘Practising – that’s what he’s doing,’ she said, ‘unless someone has brought the spade back.’

  ‘Dad’s hid it so we can’t bust it,’ replied the other contemptuously. ‘Who’s goin’ to walk mile ’n’ ’alf to borrow a spade?’

  No one. I agreed. But if somebody was already here and saw the spade, I could imagine a use for it. Impossible, however. I could not be traced to the Meltons’ cottage. The connexion between myself and Jim was absolutely undiscoverable – unless the dark stranger hadn’t gone to London at all and had been hanging around Hernsholt that very day. And I knew he had not. There would have been an immediate report to Ferrin, and from Ferrin to Ian or me.

  ‘Is there anything like a tip of loose rubbish or a sandpit near here?’ I asked.

  ‘Top of the slope behind the shed. Good sand, too. Dad’ll sell you a load if you want it.’

  I got up and drew the curtains. Jackdaw’s chatter and missing spades were no evidence of anything at all. All the same, I did not intend to go out until Jim was back with us. If meanwhile somebody knocked at the door and asked for shelter from the rain – there was no earthly reason why he shouldn’t – I would have to get the children out of the room and tell him to keep his hands up while we talked.

  It was nearly ten before the Meltons returned – with the same technique. I never even heard Jim change down. He reined the hearse back on its haunches with six inches between the bumpers and a wheelbarrow.

  Mr and Mrs Melton were thoroughly relaxed by double whiskies, and cackling over their success. On arrival at Gorble’s retreat, Jim had kept firmly in his part of driver, saying that he wouldn’t come in, that his old woman wouldn’t confide in him what it was all about and he didn’t want to know either.

  As soon as she was alone with Fred, Mrs Melton told him that a lady had given her an urgent message for he-knew-who. Gorble showed no surprise which proved that she was on the right lines. He said that the gentleman wasn’t coming back.

  Mrs Melton had then clothed herself in vague gipsy portentousness and delivered a warning that no good would come of it all. She invented a husband who was due back unexpectedly on Saturday from the Assizes. I gathered from her incoherent chuckles that he hadn’t been in the dock but was one of Her Majesty’s Judges.

  This frightened Gorble into indecision. He admitted that he could pass a message, but refused. It wasn’t worth his while, he said. The gentleman had paid him well, and there was more money promised if orders were obeyed. Fred expected to receive a telephone call – he wouldn’t say where or when – and was forbidden to open his mouth at all except to give the answers to two questions: yes or no.

  Eventually, to get rid of her, he told her what the two questions were. Had anybody been making inquiries? Was a certain person still living where he did?

  ‘Ah, him at the Warren!’ Mrs Melton exclaimed.

  That apparently satisfied Gorble that she knew more about the business than he did. He said he didn’t care to be hanging around Hernsholt asking silly questions, and would she get the information for him?

  The pair of them waved away my thanks and apologized for stopping on the road. They reckoned I’d be glad to see them.

  ‘We ’aven’t give him no trouble,’ protested the elder daughter. ‘We’ve been ’aving fun.’

  ‘Aye. In the shed. I can see that,’ said Jim severely. ‘One day you’ll get ’urt burrowin’ in all that junk.’

  ‘What’s the matter with the shed?’ I asked.

  ‘Knocked down a tarpaulin and bust a flower pot.’

  ‘Let’s go and see.’

  As soon as I had Jim outside, I told him we had never been in the shed and stopped him going straight to it.

  ‘Did you lock the door when you put the van away?’

  ‘I did. Somebody in there, you think?’

  It was most unlikely; but if the rain had driven an observer down into the shed for shelter, Jim’s sudden and dashing return would certainly have startled him. He had no time to get out of the door but he could have dived into the litter of odds and ends at the back.

  ‘Switch the light on,’ I said, ‘and don’t come any further. And don’t say anything which could give away what we’re doing – make out we’re looking for a handy plank.’

  I did not tell him that I needed him as a witness in case I had to fire in self-defence. I knew he distrusted the box as much as the dock.

  Jim switched on the light and I walked through his stores with my hand in my pocket. There was indeed a broken flower pot on the floor, and a tarpaulin had fallen – if that wasn’t its usual place – on the top of two upright rolls of wire. Behind them was possible cover for a man provided nobody looked for him.

  ‘This will do the job,’ I said, extracting a piece of four by two from a pile of loose timber.

  We shut the shed and went out. And yet I felt my enemy. That is difficult to analyse. I suppose that only years of living on one’s nerves can teach the difference between imagination which is out of control and the quite dependable instinct of the hunted.

  The instinct at any rate was strong enough for me to search about for some logical reason which could justify it. I asked what the stables at Woburn were like.

  Jim described a Victorian farmhouse with its back facing a yard round which, on the other three sides, were stables and cow sheds with a second storey of lofts over them.

  ‘When you were leading them on to tell you about fforde-Crankshaw, where actually were you?’

  ‘Bang under the gable with the clock in it.’

  ‘What’s up there?’

  ‘Nothing except rats, I’d say.’

  It was a far-fetched theory; but what about that vanishing while the horse was being unsaddled? If Mr fforde-Crankshaw were wanted by name or description, the last place the police would look for him would be the livery stables. And if he had decided to lie up there for a day he could probably see and possibly overhear all visitors to the yard.

  ‘When you were talking to the chaps there, did you give your address?’

  ‘They know it,’ Jim replied. ‘Ah, but didn’t I? Bought a nice load of manure, you see. Mushroom farmers, they’ll pay anything for well-rotted stuff. Yes, they had a new man, and I told him the nearest way.’

&
nbsp; It was working out. fforde-Crankshaw, scenting danger but partially convinced he was imagining it, must have been very tempted to check up. There had been no police inquiries, but who was Jim? What was behind his interest?

  There was one grave objection to this picture of my opponent’s board. He must have calculated on leaving the stable lofts after dark. Yet he had left in broad daylight. Was that possible without being seen and inviting questions?

  ‘What’s behind the gable with the clock in it?’

  ‘Company director’s place it was once,’ Jim said, ‘before he went bust and ’ad to run for it with all the money he’d lost farming. Other side of the stables is all his fancy trees and rhododendrons.’

  That too fitted. It was now worthwhile to test the only available fact which could prove my hypothesis – or, if not worthwhile, it had to be done. I told Jim to stay where he was, and I would find his missing spade for him. I would have liked to have him alongside me, but it was not a fair risk for the father of a family – even though I was pretty sure the tiger would not have returned to the sand-pit from which he could no longer see anything at all.

  I crawled up the slope behind the shed and put my head cautiously over the edge of the depression. The working floor of sand, some eight or nine feet beneath me, was bare and the light still good enough to distinguish any object on the flat surface. The spade was there all right.

  To see anything else I should have to go down with a torch. That was asking for trouble, since I could not know what was on the opposite side of the excavation; so I contented myself with taking a close look at the wet packed sand within a few feet of my nose. I found fresh footmarks – of a rather pointed shoe which certainly did not belong to any of the Melton family. For the weight of the tiger it was a small foot. The tracks pointed straight for the shed until they were wiped out by the furrows of my knees and forearms.

  It was all very interesting, but of no immediate use. Tiger impulsively but sensibly reconnoitres Jim’s cottage from above. Finds convenient sandpit for observation post. Hunch pays off, for he hasn’t been there long before he sees me arrive. Is tempted by spade which he can approach without being seen. A bad mistake, though doubtless it would help if my body wasn’t found for a week. Shelters from rain in shed. Could easily have explained that was just what he was doing and got away with it. But his reconstruction of my unseen board is alarming. And Jim is still an enigma. So when he is nearly caught he first hides and then clears out.

  ‘Your spade is in the sandpit,’ I told Jim. ‘Get it in the morning.’

  ‘Not now?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘When you went into the shed, I noticed you kept your ’and in your pocket,’ he said. ‘Now it’s none of my business what you got in it. And what Ferrin tells me is all lies. And me and the colonel, we don’t get on. But if you feel lonely up at the Warren, you’ve only got to say.’

  I assured him that I was only going to stay there that night, and it was unlikely I should be disturbed.

  ‘And what do you want the missus to tell Fred?’ he asked.

  ‘That nobody has made any inquiries about the rider, and that I left the Warren in a hurry.’

  I gratefully accepted his offer to drive me home, and said good-bye to Mrs Melton and the children. The front seat of the hearse was luxurious. It was a remarkable vehicle. The panels all round the body, where plate glass had been, were filled in by neatly overlapping planks attached by angle brackets to the black-and-gold pillars, and varnished black to match. The roof was of stout canvas on bentwood ribs. It made a discreet and efficient van for shifting livestock or any of Jim’s less reputable bargains.

  ‘Got it dirt cheap,’ he said. ‘There ain’t no market for used ’earses. And the bloke threw in some nice elm boards for the conversion.’

  I avoided offering a silhouette against the naked electric bulbs in the cottage porch and the shed, and kept well down in my seat until we were out on the road. Yet somehow I knew that it was utterly impossible for the tiger to be about, though my mind, very tired by now, could not see on what I based this certainty.

  As we drove towards Hernsholt I ran over the probabilities again and at last got at what was bothering me. If the shelterer from the rain had dived for the cover of those two rolls of wire on Jim’s sudden arrival, how had he ever got out of the shed? He had no chance of escaping under the eyes of both Mr and Mrs Melton and Jim had locked the door behind him. So there was something as wrong and incredible as a conjuring trick.

  And then I saw it. By all that unriddling of the unintelligible I had been distracted from what was perfectly plain and obvious. I slid instantly off the front seat and fitted as much of my body as I could into the floor of the cab, putting a finger on my lips as a sign to Jim to notice nothing.

  ‘Drive for the nearest lights and police station,’ I whispered. ‘Don’t stop on any account! If anything happens to me, keep going!’

  He looked at me in astonishment. I jerked my thumb at the shiny black boards behind the driving seat. He thought for a second and saw what I meant. There was only one place where fforde-Crankshaw could be. When he heard us coming back to the shed and unlocking the door, he had quietly taken refuge in the van. And he was still in it – with nothing but a wooden panel between me and his gun.

  There was no means of covering all of myself. If he fired a burst through the partition at the level of heart and lungs he would miss; but if he aimed below where my waist ought to be he would almost certainly score on my head or shoulders. I never felt so coldly exposed. As for slowing down or stopping – that, I thought, would give him just the chance he was waiting for in order to let me have it, jump out and vanish. He was hardly likely to take action while Jim continued to bucket over country roads at a steady forty-five. The only comfort was that if he missed me I could be out of the front seat as quickly as he could drop from the double door at the back, and at last shoot to kill without fear of the law.

  It was the devil of an indecisive position. Jim had turned east, and in another two or three minutes we were going to hit the A5 road. He might be able to swing straight into the traffic stream without stopping, but we could not count on it. At that time of night there was usually a procession of lorries passing between London and the west Midlands.

  It was the hearse’s horn which got us through. It had a deeply respectful note – funereal but commanding enough to make all long-distance lorry drivers jam on their brakes and curse the amateur. Jim halted for a second at the junction. He could not turn right to Bletchley, as we had intended, but he could – just – turn left for Stony Stratford, forcing a truck into the middle of the road and leaving a line of angrily winking headlights behind us. We may very well have given the impression of criminals escaping with the week’s wage packets.

  ‘Only one lot of traffic lights now,’ Jim whispered. ‘I’ll jump ’em if you say so. But if you’re going to ’and over to the police, what’s your ’urry?’

  I explained that I dared not give him a safe chance to jump out.

  ‘How thick are those boards?’ I asked.

  ‘Thick enough to keep him in.’

  ‘He’s only got to open the doors at the back.’

  ‘’E can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because there ain’t no ’andle on the inside. Passengers don’t need it, like. Not if the coffin’s nailed down proper.’

  I remember bursting into a bark of laughter, which I suppose was partly hysterical. So the tiger was as helplessly caught as if he had been a real tiger! It wouldn’t do him any good to kill. Nothing would do him any good. He was on his way to the cage or the taxidermist in a plain, black-varnished box-trap.

  The line of lights on the main street of Stony Stratford was just ahead when a police car passed us, pulled across in front and signalled to Jim to stop.

  Two of the cops closed in on us, on
e at my door and one at Jim’s. They were very evidently prepared to tell us that whatever we said was, was not. What has made British police adopt their new fashion of weary brutality? Forced on them by criminals or borrowed from alien films? At any rate I did not trust them to take my story seriously. I wanted an inspector at a desk.

  At first they accused Jim of not stopping at a Halt Sign. When he insisted that he did stop, they dropped the effort to make him confess he didn’t and merely warned him not to take chances. It was pretty clear that the lorry driver who reported us had been a sport and had contented himself with abusing our road sense and our suspicious-looking vehicle.

  While one of them examined Jim’s papers, the other ordered me to get out and open up the van.

  ‘Open it yourself!’ I said. ‘And stand behind the door while you do it!’

  The van was empty. A flap of the canvas roof hung down, neatly cut out with a knife. The tiger had escaped without even the necessity for any acrobatics. Notches and joints on the corner posts, to which the ornate canopy had once been attached, provided easy footholds. Either at the junction with the main road or now while the police were lecturing us he had climbed up, quietly and decisively chosen his moment and slid to the ground at the back of the van.

  I looked up the road. There on the other side of it was his unmistakable figure walking fast but casually past the first of the street lamps. He waved to a bus turning out of a corner ahead. Naturally it did not wait, but that gave him an excuse to hurry. I pointed at him and may have even opened my mouth to shout ‘Stop him!’ But my arm dropped. What was the use? How in an instant could I persuade those pompous young cops that it was I, not he, who was a law-abiding citizen?

  And what charge could I bring? I had not the slightest proof that he had ever been in the van. Jim had never seen his face. I – well, all I could swear after these days and nights of anxiety at the Warren, at the badger fortress and on the road was that I had once observed him out on a quiet country walk. No, for my own safety it was wiser at this point not to reveal that I suspected him. When we met again he could no longer take me by surprise, for I had seen his face and he still did not know it.