I shook with self-control and heard myself saying:
‘I have a right to know with whom I must deal. Your identity matters no longer.’
‘The Vicomte de Saint Sabas.’
I knew the name – and on one point more intimately than the historians who watch down the centuries the inevitable and unruly appearance of a Saint Sabas whenever the nobles of France are trumpeting defiance to the King of England or their own.
‘You have a son?’ I asked.
‘I have.’
‘My conscience is easier.’
‘You are impertinent!’
‘No, sir. The first Saint Sabas was a steward of the Dennims and ennobled by us. So I did not wish to end the family. I cannot help the disgrace.’
‘Disgrace?’
The word stung him a lot more than my medieval absurdity – which, anyway, he knew to be true. I explained it.
‘You murdered an innocent postman, Saint Sabas. Was that an execution too? Chicago style?’
‘An accident!’ he exploded. ‘How the devil could I foresee it?’
His right arm began to move. Slightly quicker the barrel of the Mauser was over the edge of the table. Both weapons returned to the lap.
I told him the true story of my war. It was fair that the man should be given a chance to believe. But the facts seemed to make no impression at all on those impatient and contemptuous eyes. How could they? If he had accepted them, he would have had to face his own guilt.
‘My reply to that is that you are a liar and a coward,’ he said. ‘Not even Dickfuss thought of claiming to be a British agent.’
I finished my drink and disregarded the minor insult. I remarked – though, as I say, it wasn’t a self I knew which was speaking – that it was difficult to arrange conditions between a liar and a madman, but that I would make a suggestion.
I was well aware of the suicidal folly of what this damned Graf von Dennim was about to propose. But I could see no other way out. I refused to kill Saint Sabas in cold blood. And if I made the slightest move from that table towards the back door of the pub or towards Nur Jehan, Saint Sabas would kill me. At least our ancestors could get us out of the stalemate when nothing else could.
‘I give you no conditions,’ he said.
‘Then you may accept mine. You know the barn in its clump of trees. We will ride towards it together but out of pistol shot. We will halt three hundred yards from it.
‘I shall stay where I am, giving you time to examine the barn thoroughly since I know it and you do not. You will then retire to a distance of three hundred yards on the other side. We shall still be in sight of each other and can know if the terms are observed.’
‘How do I know you will not ride off and hide in a police station?’
‘How do I know you won’t vanish? Savarin has a lot of practice in changing his name and appearance.’
‘You know it because I intend to kill you. I am impatient, von Dennim.’
His voice rose a little above its usual cold tone. He was savagely impatient.
That was my motive, too, I said. I did not intend to spend the rest of my life examining my food and parcels.
He still refused to accept. He had no fear of dying, only of dying before he could kill. I knew that, but I accused him of being afraid. He was quite unmoved.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am afraid you will run.’
This was getting beyond endurance. I felt an appalling, nervous desire to laugh. The Graf von Dennim and the zoologist were each finding the other ridiculous, with the result that both were near hysteria.
‘You spat in my face,’ I said. ‘Shall I put it this way for you? That even if a von Dennim is a Gestapo officer and a Saint Sabas murders postmen, each has a tradition in spite of it.’
He looked at me with less assurance, or at any rate with less intensity of hatred. He was human again – the deliberate, discriminating judge of what his victim was likely to do.
‘You are different from the rest,’ he said, ‘I will agree to your conditions.’
I stood up with my back to the windows of the inn and slipped the Mauser into its holster. Saint Sabas wavered, and I had a clear view of his weapon. It was a .45 automatic. The Dennim family held his eyes contemptuously for me, while the familiar self disapproved in abject panic of this highly dangerous theatre. He put on the safety catch and dropped the pistol into his outside pocket.
We walked side by side to our horses without a word. The atmosphere of formality seemed to be working. The few horsy villagers who watched us must, I am sure, have assumed that the two beautifully mounted middle-aged men were old friends who chose to be silent.
When we were alone and back on the green road which led to the hill top, we separated. Each kept close to the fence on his own side with twenty yards of turf and ruts between the horses. Nur Jehan strongly objected.
‘There is no reason to fight your horse,’ Saint Sabas said. ‘What little beauty is in this world has already suffered enough from you. I will give you my word of honour that you may safely ride by my side, and I will accept yours.’
I thanked him, and added:
‘The light is going fast.’
‘It was too clear this evening. It looks like rain.’
‘Not before midnight, I should say.’
‘It has certainly been a remarkable June.’
‘Yes. We have both been fortunate in our weather.’
‘It would interest me to know one thing. All along you invited this meeting, von Dennim?’
‘I did.’
‘No police at all in it?’
There was a limit to confidence. I was not going to tell him that.
‘What they are doing you probably know as well as I do, Saint Sabas.’
‘My French blood tells,’ he said with a harsh laugh. ‘At one moment I am overwhelmed by the cunning of the British. At the next I am certain that all the cunning is invented by myself.’
The hill top was now bare and dismal under the overcast sky. There was just enough wind to sing faintly in the telephone wires which marched up the hill along with us and ended at the last house. The barn and the wide clump of trees were no longer sinister as they had been in sunlight. Set in the greater loneliness of the uplands, they suggested shelter and a roof.
‘I doubt if we shall be able to see each other at six hundred yards,’ I said.
‘I will signal to you with a torch when I am in position.’
‘Mine, I am afraid, is in my rucksack at the barn.’
‘It works?’ he asked.
‘Yes, very well.’
‘Take this, then! I will pick up yours when I examine the barn.’
Saint Sabas handed over his torch, and with a slight inclination of the head rode forward to the clump of trees.
I returned his bow. It is possible that the exchange of torches was as near as he could bring himself to a salute. Religious maniacs – if I am right in my fanciful explanation of him – can be very pleasant people so long as the subject of damnation does not come up. But at the time I was divided between admiration of his manners and suspicion that he intended to tamper with my rucksack. I dismissed it. Whatever century we were in, both of us were in it. And in any case the time for assassination by drugs or explosives had passed.
Dusk and the trees swallowed up Saint Sabas. I dismounted and thought over what my tactics were going to be. There could be no more doubts whether I had a moral right to kill him. I had not a dog’s chance of living if I didn’t, and it was pointless even to worry about my legal position. I was empty of anger and mercy alike. If it had just been a question of losing my own life, I might still have had some trouble with conscience; but it was my future with Benita which was at stake, and that was a very different matter from my future with squirrels. The first shot must deliver us from any more f
ear, and no damned nonsense about it.
Fieldcraft and silent feet were all I had to put against his speed and desperation. Savarin must have had as much battle experience as any long-lived infantry platoon sergeant, while I myself, though I had been under fire, had no experience of attack. His other overwhelming advantage was that he did not care whether he died or not so long as I did. The game was up for him. Too many people had seen him with me. The most he could ever hope for was the life of a fugitive if he were able to get out of England before my body was found.
The obvious first move was to get into the thick belt of trees around the barn and let the other fellow do the attacking: in fact, to hold the interior lines. Saint Sabas would not see any objection, for he knew nothing whatever of my history. Right up to that evening he had assumed that I was just a discreditable member of the Dennim family; there were plenty to choose from, especially among the Bavarian branch, and some of them had been Nazis. So he had no reason to suspect that under the trees I was likely to be his master.
Very well. I could reckon on his riding hard and straight for the windbreak and then lying up in cover, rather than taking advantage of his well-trained mare and attacking me in the open.
Far away across the empty plateau I saw the torch winking at me. I mounted Nur Jehan and answered. Saint Sabas charged into sight along the line I expected, and I, instead of racing him for the trees and getting the whole width of the cover between us, galloped off on a tangent to the right of the windbreak. The range closed to a hundred yards as he held his course, but the light was more deceptive than I anticipated. I dropped to the ground, fired and grazed – for the shadowy figure raised a hand to his neck or ear – fired again and missed. Horse and man vanished into the trees.
That was that. At the cost of some slight loss of blood he had won the interior lines, and my plan of dropping him clean in the open had landed me in the worst possible position. It was unlikely that I would ever have another chance to use my longer range and greater accuracy unless Saint Sabas were caught on the move by the sudden appearance of the moon. It was up, showing faintly through the drifting clouds and occasionally unobscured.
I was out of the effective range of his .45 automatic. It was a better weapon than mine, however, for hand-to-hand fighting in semi-darkness, and I now had to close with it. The only safe move was to crawl away quickly until I was part of the hillside and then enter the windbreak wherever shadows and ground permitted approach. He could not guard all his perimeter.
But couldn’t he? I reckoned that I could guard the perimeter very easily when I myself chose for my night’s lodging the isolated copse. I did not fancy stalking that inscrutable wall of twilight from any direction whatever. The ground sloped gently away from the trees and was bare turf.
Though I had been telling myself again and again that I must not let him break contact, I should have been very glad at the moment if some belated shepherd or gamekeeper had come up the hill and frightened him off. But there was little chance of that. The nearest cottages were half a mile away and sheltered from direct sound by the contours of the hill. Even if the two cracks of the Mauser were carried sharply on the wind they need not necessarily attract attention. Somewhere to the east on lower ground, perhaps belonging to the lady with the dogs, three or four guns had been out after wood-pigeon coming in to roost. There were also cherry orchards, well down on the Worcestershire side, banging away all night with their bird alarms. Those exasperating charges had once made me dive for cover near Chipping Marton, when fortunately Benita was not with me. Farmers set them to go off at intervals during the twenty-four hours and had – or said they had – no means of putting them out of action after dark.
I heard Saint Sabas cantering on through the windbreak. He was now presumably tying his mare to a tree. I had nothing to which I could tether Nur Jehan. He stayed close, but was thoroughly uneasy and restless. He was not grazing. At any rate – and that was a blessing – he was not in the affectionate mood to follow his rider about.
There was probably time to run boldly for the trees, but I had learned to take no gambles in a hurry against Savarin. I remained cuddling the butt of the Mauser and thinking out the end game of this blind chess which we had played for the last three weeks. As soon as he was at the edge of the windbreak – and he might well have turned his mare loose and be there already – he should be able to see Nur Jehan close to the point where I had flung myself off and fired. He would not expect me, too, still to be close. But I would be. The ground helped.
A slight fold led obliquely to the clump of trees. It was hardly visible as a depression at all, but on the rim were nine-inch stems of seeding grass, just tall enough in that light to be a screen rather than a guide to my movements. I rolled over into it.
Hoping that he was now straining his eyes in the wrong direction, I slowly followed the fold closer and closer to the trees. When I had reached a point fifteen yards out, there was nothing for it but to rush the rest across the open. But I was not much afraid of that. Thick cloud was blowing.
I started to leave my cover. I had already drawn a leg under me ready for the spring and raised my head when I was fairly caught by the erratic moon. I lay still, praying that Saint Sabas was not on my side of the trees at all and well aware that, if he was, the dark blotch of my body could be made out. His shot – a carefully aimed shot to judge by the infernal delay – plunged into the turf alongside my ribs. I cried out, kicked myself straight and rolled back into the fold of the ground I had just left.
His years as Savarin had probably taught him the difference of sound between a bullet in turf and a bullet in flesh. But at that range I doubted if he could have heard the strike at all; the report would cover it. There was a good chance, if my cry had been convincing enough, that he would come up cautiously to administer the coup de grâce.
Silence went on and on for what seemed all of half an hour. I did not dare stir. At last I heard him on the move. He was somewhere in the middle of the trees near the barn. That indicated a doubt in his mind. He was not going to leave cover opposite my body; he was going to approach from some unexpected angle. I still felt, however, that he could approach from any angle he liked. If he meant to fire a last shot into the copse I had him.
Saint Sabas mounted his mare. I heard the creak of leather and the jingle of the bit. Was he so convinced of the effect of his shot that he intended to ride off? But that was out of character. So I decided that he was bluffing. If he could persuade me be had gone, I should get pretty tired of lying still to no purpose and soon show whether I was alive or not.
Distances were short and it was all very quick. He seemed to be cantering round the windbreak towards me. I assumed that he meant to come into sight just out of easy range and ride away. He came closer still, now just inside the trees, offering a possible shot; but I had had enough of moving targets in the dusk and it was not worth while to raise my head and look at him. There would be time enough for action when the sound of the hooves stopped or passed on.
They did neither. Man and horse burst out of the copse and charged me, Saint Sabas leaning low over the mane. I had not a hope. I was clinging to my tiny fold of ground as if I had been flattened into it by a roller. There was no chance to fire. By the time I had changed position and begun to elevate the barrel they were on me.
Shot on the ground or trampled into it. I chose the latter. But the good mare of course put her feet where I was not. And that was all the more to her credit since Saint Sabas must have been already reining her in. When I was half up he had already wheeled her round and was on me again.
I jinked like a snipe. My only cover was the mare herself. I cannot explain in any detail what happened. At one moment I was under her chest and hanging on to the martingale with one hand while trying to thrust the Mauser into a pocket with the other. I had released the awkward holster-butt. I don’t know how or when.
Looking back at it in cold
blood, I think I should have shot the mare. That I didn’t was not due to any compunction. I repeat – she was the only cover I had. She was precious. As I saw it then, he could kill me as she fell to her knees or while he was coming off.
If he had had a sabre he could have cut me down three times over. A .45 Colt from a frantic, rearing horse was a less reliable weapon. Where the shots went I do not know, but they didn’t hit. One nicked the point of the shoulder, for I remember vividly the smell of burnt hair and I think I saw a streak of blood. That was the end. The mare shied and fought him, and I was into the trees before he could regain control.
I dropped on to the carpet of beech leaves gasping for breath. To be at the receiving end of a cavalry charge is not a sport for a man in his forties. It took me some time to realize that I was unhurt, and longer still before my hand was steady enough to shoot. I told myself that honours were even. Saint Sabas had found out with little risk to himself that I was not dead. On the other hand I was safely in cover and could at last fight my battle under conditions which I understood. An optimistic view, but good for morale. If ever a man had been defeated, I had.
Now for the first time I realized that there was going to be no quick end to this duel. When I put forward my desperate proposal which allowed us at last to rise from that garden table I had imagined an affair of dishonour in the last of the daylight which ten minutes would settle. I did not foresee the low, grey cloud sweeping across the Cotswolds and bringing night half an hour too soon. My life was going to depend on chancy snap-shooting in darkness, and the question of ammunition supply was vital.
Had Saint Sabas got an extra magazine? Very improbable. He must have ridden out that afternoon assuming – if one could guess what murderers assumed – that one or, at the most, two shots would do. How many had he fired from his mare? Was it three or four? I was ashamed of not knowing, but it had seemed like a dozen. Only by counting the reports in my memory – as a man can count afterwards the number of times a single cylinder has fired though at the moment the roar was nearly continuous – could I work out the truth. It was four, plus his first shot from the edge of the trees. That left Saint Sabas three in his magazine against eight in the Mauser. Better say four in the magazine in case he started with one up the spout. And he would. By this time I knew him.
Watcher in the Shadows Page 16
