Watcher in the Shadows

by Geoffrey Household

  I pretended to misunderstand. I pointed out that my observations were generally held to be accurate and my theories interesting though debatable.

  ‘All this beating about the bush!’ the admiral thundered. ‘You let me deal with this in my own way, Georgi! Damn it, I’m the oldest friend the boy has got, and I could tell you all about his type when I was a snotty! Your aunt means that she knows the bomb was meant for you, and that’s why you went off to your Warren!’

  Quite absurd, I said. If I had thought the bomb was meant for me, I should have stayed at home under police guard instead of exposing myself in the country. And anyway what earthly motive could there be?

  ‘Both of us know the motive as well as you do.’

  ‘Peregrine!’ my aunt appealed.

  ‘I will not shut up, Georgi. Never heard anything like it in my life! All this devotion to each other and never going near the facts! Sacred Teeth, boy, I’ve had the girl in tears!’

  Georgina in tears was unthinkable. But I still did not know where I was.

  ‘I give you my word of honour, sir, that I do not know any reason for wanting to kill me,’ I said. ‘And if either of you do, please tell me.’

  ‘Obviously revenge – with a past like yours!’

  Georgina took command.

  ‘When you came out of hospital, Charles, I had a talk with your Colonel Parrow. I have never mentioned it to you. We both thought it best that you should forget.’

  The unthinkable was true before my eyes. She was in tears.

  ‘My fault, Georgi!’ Cunobel assured her, his bellow much muted. ‘I should have left it alone! But, great Blood and Bones, a von Dennim in the Gestapo! Isn’t there a dam’ thing those cloak-and-dagger boys won’t do? I’d hang the lot of them as war criminals. I saw it all when I was at the Admiralty. Bastards! Take a clean, clever boy and torture him! Damn it, the other side will only shoot him if they catch him, and honour him too! Dirty, lousy tricks they call Intelligence! You’ve a right to order a man to die, but you’ve no right to do that to him.’

  The admiral’s storm of sincerity was effective. I cannot analyse what had been going on in my mind. I know that I had been on the point of walking out of that unbearable house which had exposed my shame. But this protest of an honourable fighting man that the damage you did to the enemy could never excuse the damage done to the individual soul was, though eccentric for these days, extraordinarily comforting.

  Oddly enough, my first impulse was to defend my service. It was Hitler’s fault, not theirs, that I had landed in the Gestapo.

  ‘There was a right,’ I said. ‘Perhaps not in former wars, but in the last war when the whole of our Christian civilization was at stake there was no limit to what could be asked. We sold ourselves to the devil for the sake of the faith, and it depends on the God which is within us whether we have to keep the bargain for ever. And no one can help.’

  As soon as I had said that, I felt it was far too dramatic and in my case untrue. I apologized to Georgina.

  ‘How much did Ian tell you?’ I asked.

  ‘Your precious Ian,’ she answered indignantly, ‘told me as little as he possibly could. And he wouldn’t have said that much if I hadn’t made him tell me why you refused your decoration. I also spoke a year later to the Olga Coronel whom you rescued.’

  ‘Did you manage to convince her that I wasn’t all I seemed?’

  This question, which I may have put bitterly, at once restored dear Georgina to her proper form.

  ‘Charles, you are extraordinarily stupid in all questions of women,’ she declared. ‘Do you really suppose that after five minutes with you she, one of the most quick and intelligent creatures I have ever come across, did not know the difference between a selfless agent risking his life under British orders and a Gestapo officer corrupt enough to take a bribe?’

  She told me all that Olga Coronel had said about me; it was certainly polite. Apparently she had come over from Belgium specially to find and thank me on behalf of Catherine Dessayes and herself. But Georgina and the psychiatrists thought we had better not meet. I can’t say whether they were right or wrong. I do not know – mercifully – how much trouble I had given them.

  ‘The trouble with you, boy,’ said Cunobel, ‘is that because you’re not friends with yourself you think nobody else can be.’

  I admitted to myself that there was an inevitable element of truth in that. In the recent agitated days I had received astonishing kindness from people who had little means of judging me beyond my face. Charles Dennim couldn’t understand it; but I suppose the young Graf von Dennim of twenty years before would have taken it as a matter of course. Had he trust in his fellow men and women, or sheer conceit?

  ‘Now what have you been up to since that poor postman was killed?’ the admiral went on. ‘Georgi, you’d better have some more Madeira.’

  I gave them the barest facts of the story, playing it as a straight, personal investigation with practically no risk. I noticed that Cunobel twice refilled Georgina’s glass and that she was quite unaware of it.

  ‘I see,’ he said at last, with a shadow of a wink to me. ‘Well, you’ve done very well, and we’ll just set the police on now to establish his identity. Georgi, this has all been a great shock to you. Would you like to lie down a little before you go home?’

  I never admired my dear aunt so much as at that moment. She rose stiffly to her feet with concentrated, masculine dignity.

  ‘I promised his mother I would look after him and I will,’ she said.

  ‘I never knew you had seen her again after 1914!’ the admiral exclaimed, carried away into a slight tactlessness by his surprise.

  ‘It was quite unnecessary, Peregrine, for my sister to be alive in order to make her a promise.’

  She swallowed a hiccup and strode dead straight for the door.

  ‘I shall not require a rest of more than ten minutes, and I shall ring for Frank if I want anything,’ she said.

  When we were satisfied that she had made herself very comfortable in the bedroom next to mine and was sleeping like a child, Cunobel took me through my story again and got the truth. His brain was still as incisive as his speech, and he was right when he claimed to know my type. He made me feel like the captain of a fast cruiser just in from a successful reconnaissance.

  ‘Got the letter from your chap in the Austrian Ministry of Justice?’ he asked.

  I took it from my wallet and gave it to him, warning him that it was in German.

  ‘And what do you think assistant naval attachés were doing in Vienna before 1914?’ he snorted. ‘They didn’t send ’em there to learn to waltz! Your mother and Georgi found my German as comic as a music-hall turn in those days. But by the time I’d finished two wars I could have written Grand Admiral Raeder’s orders for him!’

  He put on his glasses and read the letter very slowly twice.

  ‘I thought you were running pretty close to a quibble when you said you knew no motive for killing you,’ he remarked. ‘But I see what you mean now. Why you? Why this Sporn, Dickfuss and Weber when there were dozens of other swine as bad? And then you feel sure this fellow wasn’t in Buchenwald in your time with or without his eyebrows. Identity unknown. Motive unknown. And if it weren’t for you, face unknown too.’

  ‘You think I was right?’ I asked with some surprise, for I expected him to take the same view as Ian.

  ‘Right? Of course you were right! I reckon German police are as good as our own, and they don’t have to pull their punches either. But he’s beaten them. I’ve got just enough faith in Scotland Yard to believe that they would get him after he killed you – especially with all your Colonel Parrow and I could tell them. But until he does, they are helpless.

  ‘Shall we call ’em in? Well, that’s your business, Charles. It’s your life. On your description they could certainly root out all his movement
s in your suburb and establish how he watched you and when. Then, of course, they’ll raid Soho and North Kensington because they always do. That won’t do ’em much good when the man they want is so respectable he could be a Chief Constable himself. Still, let’s assume they do get on to the trail of the right man and are nearly ready to arrest him for the murder of the postman. Don’t tell me he wouldn’t know they were after him even before they got to the point of asking a few, polite questions! And then where is he? Gone, and waiting to have a crack at you next year!

  ‘I’ll tell you what, boy! I think you’re wrong when you say he’s the sort of chap who might be lunching at my table in the club. He might, so far as his type goes. But in fact he can’t be well known in England. Imagine what would happen if he was! There he is, travelling back and forth to Woburn and prowling round your district. Now, if he had a lot of friends, he’d run into one. “Good God, Dick, what’s happened to your hair and eyebrows? Changed your barber?” And then it’s all over the place in no time. See what I mean?’

  He was undoubtedly right. So we had a convincing picture of a man who knew England inside out, but had very few friends here – or, possibly, had not been in the country for so many years that his friends would not easily recognize him.

  ‘Wild guess, Charles!’ he went on. ‘No good taking it to the police! They want facts, like you scientists, not intelligent conjecture. But one can’t win a war that way – not even your private one. All one ever knows of the enemy is conjecture.’

  I said that the speed and accuracy of conjecture on the opposite side were more like second sight. I could not understand how he had managed to trace me and begin reconnaissance all within eight days.

  ‘Of course not! A man can’t see the wood for the trees when he’s sweating with panic. Didn’t you say your Isaac Purvis spotted him on the way back from the badgers to the Long Down and that his course would take him past your cottage? Well, where was my letter to you?’

  ‘On the floor of the passage inside the front door.’

  ‘Plenty of time to steam it open with you stuck in a bramble bush!’

  I doubted that. He had not plenty of time – five or ten minutes at the most, and those he would have used to prowl around the cottage and make sure it was empty and unwatched, not to steam letters open. It was not in his character to take unnecessary risks.

  Otherwise Cunobel was right. The envelope of his letter had looked a bit untidy, which might have aroused my suspicions if I had known his passion for neatness as well as I knew it now. The visitor had simply raised the flap of the envelope with a sharp knife and stuck it up again. If he had made a mess of the job, he would merely have walked off with the letter and I should have been none the wiser.

  I asked Cunobel for his frank advice – as my oldest friend, which I really began to feel he was.

  ‘How are your nerves?’ he grunted.

  I replied that they seemed to be all right, but were evidently affecting my alertness.

  ‘Sleeping well?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Ever occurred to you that you’re doing a public service?’

  I wasn’t going to admit that I had once been in a state of drivelling terror while walking along a harmless road, and had comforted myself with that very thought.

  ‘Well, you are. How many other mistakes has he made, besides that poor postman, which we don’t know about? It’s a bad business, boy. I had a nasty case when I was at the Admiralty. Anonymous letters from a poor devil telling us to make our peace with God because it was his duty to shoot us all. He turned out to be a retired Commander who was crazy as a coot and never showed any other sign of it. Special Branch had the hell of a time running him to earth.

  ‘I remember what the Assistant Commissioner told me. Political assassins – all in the day’s work! Criminal lunatics – bothering, but they reckon to pick ’em up! What’s a fair nightmare to them is the potential murderer who isn’t a political, doesn’t mix with criminals, doesn’t show any eccentricities. Get at his grievance, and you’ll get his identity! But if you haven’t a clue to his motive and he’s cunning, he’ll tie up a considerable force of men on plain guard duties.

  ‘Now, in a case like yours I think Special Branch would try to trap their man. Use a decoy. In fact do just what you are doing. But they’d never allow it without a copper up every tree. Your method is better, but I don’t like it. You go on staying with me, Charles. He can’t do very much while you’re here. Let’s sit quiet and see if he makes a mistake!’

  That was true enough. At Chipping Marton I was seldom alone, and there was no regularity in my movements. That patron of the Bath and West could only watch. He had little chance of attack without being seen. So long as I remained with the admiral, our game was adjourned for refreshments and I could rest.

  But rest is in the mind. There was no feeling it. And this was the more exasperating because I knew that for the first time in twenty years I had all the ingredients of happiness. There was a new, dear warmth between Georgina and myself. There was the training of Nur Jehan. There was my delight in the child, Benita – a desolate delight, for I had to emphasize to myself that she was, compared to a man of forty-three, a child. And all this ruined because I could not move without a degrading .22 pistol in my pocket!

  Benita had little interest in horses. She could ride, of course. The local Pony Club had seen to that before she was twelve – leaving her at the same time with a lasting dislike of the revivalist religion of the horse and its female pastors. Aunt Georgina, with her matter-of-fact nineteenth-century attitude, had been an exception. Georgina shrugged her shoulders at enthusiasm and simply laid down the law that a person of sense should know exactly what was going on in his or her stables just as the modern car driver ought to (but doesn’t) know enough to give precise orders to his garage.

  So in the country Benita walked. In London, I gathered, never. I could not avoid these casual strolls without inexplicable surliness, and I did not want to. But she very soon spotted my preference for the open, wind-swept tops of the Cotswolds.

  She put down my manner to a curious life and a dangerous war. Georgina had told her that much. Whether she thought I needed an exorcist or a psychiatrist I was not sure, and I don’t think she was.

  One afternoon she said to me quietly:

  ‘There is nothing behind you, Charles.’

  I had looked back twice when passing along the bottom of a dry valley. The steep sides were clothed with patches of gorse, intersected by runways of silent turf. It was easy to come down from the top in short rushes quite unseen, until the range had closed to ten yards and that intent, dark face was smiling at my back. What went on ahead of me I did not care. The birds would give me warning.

  I apologized for my restlessness.

  ‘But you look as if you really expected something,’ she said.

  ‘A naturalist always does. The watcher begins to resemble the watched.’

  ‘Are animals afraid all the time?’

  I answered that I did not think so – not in our sense of the word anyway – but that fear was never far from the surface, was acceptable and might even be enjoyable. Everything which preserves must in theory be enjoyable: mating, the satisfaction of hunger and the feeding of the young. A hare, for example, obviously triumphs in a narrow escape; you can see self-confidence in the easy gallop. Extreme danger is pleasurable to a few soldiers – even civilized, sensitive soldiers. And aren’t there young idiots in America who drive cars at each other down the centre of the road to see who will get out of the way first?

  ‘All the time, all around us,’ I said, ‘Death is making his reconnaissance.’

  ‘But it’s life which you are afraid of,’ Benita replied.

  ‘Because I look behind me?’ I laughed.

  She accepted that as just an unconscious gesture. I behaved as if I were haunted, she said, onl
y because I was continually looking back into my life instead of forward. There was enough truth in the accusation for me to accept it without awkwardness.

  But God knew the haunting was real enough! I had always the impression that I was being watched, though I now believe that at the moment I was not. Physically, that is. Death was at his headquarters, collecting the intelligence reports.

  Only Benita saw anything wrong with me. Her father did not. There was no reason why he should. The link between us – all the link I was admitting – was Nur Jehan. Since he fought Georgina and Benita, and Gillon when on his back was too indulgent, only I could begin to school him.

  It was never fair to call the vicar unpractical. What he lacked was capital, not common sense. He was a most lovable man, unaffected, fully able to hold the respect of his parishioners outside the church and their attention within it. His only worry – a severe worry – was Chipping Marton Vicarage, which he could not even keep in proper repair. He was rightly determined that at least the garden should bring in an income to pay for the house.

  ‘My dear Dennim,’ he said to me once, ‘you are a man of the world. You would probably agree that I should be fully justified in turning the vicarage into a guest-house or in using my leisure, such as it is, to practise some harmless form of commerce or home industry.’

  I did not agree – and since I knew that he didn’t either I said so.

  ‘The limit of the permissible,’ he went on. ‘Yes, one soon arrives at it. Two hundred years ago the vicar of Chipping Marton worked the land and fed his family. We clergy of today have not the time and probably not the skill. Yet to produce, to make grow, to create – that much I feel is allowable to a servant of the Creator. I have given my spare time to specialities with some success. You will find Gloxinia Rev. Matthew Gillon in most nurserymen’s catalogues, though I doubt if I made fifty pounds out of it. I grew tomatoes and strawberries for seed. Admiral Cunobel was unconvinced, but I was able materially to assist Benita in London until it appeared that the varieties which had been recommended to me were very subject to disease. I feel that Nur Jehan is in that category of innocent creation which I permit myself. My conscience insists that to keep so beautiful an animal at stud is a valuable service to the community.’