‘How long have you been here?’
‘About half an hour. It all took time.’
I longed for the admiral and Georgina, but the car which came slowly bumping over the turf was not his. The hill gave an impression of early morning before a race meeting. There were little groups of people drifting up from the villages and looking for places with a good view from which they would not be ordered back by the police.
The car was allowed to drive right up to us. Out of it jumped Sir Thomas Pamellor, more shrimp-like than ever – for he was unbrushed, unshaven and bristling with anxiety and importance. He didn’t recognize me, didn’t even look. I was just a vulgar and unpleasant casualty.
‘I say, Callender, what’s all this?’ he asked.
‘We are a little doubtful, Sir Thomas,’ the inspector answered. ‘On the face of it, there seems to have been a quarrel.’
‘What? Teddy boys at it again? But what’s it got to do with my guest never coming home? He said he might be late, so I wasn’t bothering till I heard the mare had been picked up on the Tewkesbury road. I hope they haven’t molested him in any way. Such a shocking example for a distinguished Frenchman!’
‘What is his name, sir?’
‘The Vicomte de Saint Sabas. And very pro-British, Callender! His mother’s family … God bless my soul, what was their name? Two little “f”s. Not fforde, not ffolliot, not ffoulkes. Anyway his grandfather owned a lot of land in Northamptonshire. Oh, a very useful friend of this country! At heart he is just as English as I am French. Now, if only there were a few more people like us …’
‘Would that be him, sir?’
I felt able to sit up and look round. A little way out from the edge of the copse, where he had fallen, two constables and a doctor were bending over him. Sir Thomas bustled across and cried out:
‘Saint Sabas! Good God!’
The man was unkillable. He appeared to murmur something, for I could see Sir Thomas listening. He came bounding back.
‘Look here, inspector, what has been going on? I am a magistrate and I have a right to be told.’
‘We don’t know, sir. A neighbour of yours, Admiral Cunobel, called up headquarters as soon as he heard about the Arab horse and told them that Mr Dennim was in danger of his life. But the Vee … the, er … your friend cannot explain yet.’
‘In danger of his life? From Saint Sabas? Quite impossible, Callender!’ Sir Thomas exploded. ‘I knew the Vicomte well before the war. Used to shoot with him. I don’t say he wouldn’t engage in an affair of honour. I’m French enough myself to understand that a quiet meeting is preferable to all that nasty English publicity of a libel action. But where are the seconds? We should find them here. To my mind this is a perfectly plain case of attempted murder, and you should charge this fellow at once. I know him. Lunched with me! I had a very unfavourable impression. An international adventurer, I understand. The French thought somebody wanted to blow him up. I should advise you to let Scotland Yard know immediately.’
He turned on me, as if I were unfortunate enough to be under his command.
‘What have you got to say for yourself, Dennim?’
‘Nothing,’ I answered.
‘But you – you may have killed him.’
I said I thought it very likely.
‘This was a – a duel, what?’
‘You could call it that.’
‘What are you?’ he blustered. ‘I don’t believe you’re English at all.’
‘More, sir, at any rate than I was yesterday.’
He stared at me, outraged.
‘Caution him and take a statement, inspector!’
‘I think we had better be patient a little longer, Sir Thomas,’ said Inspector Callender imperturbably.
I lay back, for I had used up too much energy answering insolence with insolence. I had an uneasy feeling that when Saint Sabas prophesied in the inn garden that I should be tried for my life, he was probably right. The police were very kind and – which surprised me – gentle. But I was too conscious of their passionless faces; I mean, that closed expression which assumes the worst of human nature while assuring you that everything is for the best, that juries are sensible and warders understanding and cells very comfortable and that you may pin up a picture of your wife after the first six months. It’s what we pay ’em for, Jim Melton said.
Another car was in sight, leaping over the rutted track without any regard at all for the springs. I had no doubt that the admiral was in it. He had first made a name for himself in command of a destroyer at the Battle of Jutland, and attacked an empty road in the same spirit. I was so glad to see him that I nearly passed out again.
He dashed out of the car, making a commanding gesture to the passengers in the back that they were to stay where they were.
‘Great Blood and Bones, boy! Not got you, has he?’
I told him I was all right except for a cut across the scalp, and begged him to do any explaining he could.
‘Ah, Cunobel!’ Sir Thomas interrupted. ‘Glad you’re here! You’ll be a great help to me. A guest of mine, the Vicomte de St Sabas, has been assassinated.’
‘Saint Sabas? Saint Sabas? I used to know his mother very well.’
The admiral looked questioningly at me, and I nodded.
‘I’m afraid this fellow Dennim has taken in the pair of us completely,’ Sir Thomas went on. ‘As it is, I’m having trouble with the police. I insist on him being cautioned and charged.’
‘Charge him? Charge my aunt!’ Cunobel roared. ‘Bougrez off, Pamellor! Bougrez off, as they say in French! If you want someone to listen to you, you bloody fool, go and send a signal to the cabinet!’
He knelt down beside me and eased me back on to the police pillow with fatherly tenderness.
‘I’ve got Georgina and the Gillon girl in the car. I told ’em they had to wait till I found out how the land lay. His aunt,’ he explained to the inspector, ‘the only close relative. You’ve had a talk with her on the telephone already, eh? She’s always right, but it takes plain chaps like you and me time to recover, eh? Shall I let them loose, Charles?’
I said doubtfully that I was not a pretty sight. I did not want Benita dragged into this. But he pulled the blanket up to my chin and beckoned to the car.
Benita ran ahead. She gave no other sign of anxiety. She played the well-brought-up Englishwoman, determined to keep a strange world out of our private lives. I had not seen her in the part before, and it disturbed me that her quick, vivid face should be so deliberately empty.
‘That blasted horse!’ she said.
It took me an appreciable second to remember that she knew nothing. I couldn’t start explaining. I just assured her that a couple of days in hospital were all I needed, and asked after Nur Jehan.
‘Daddy is down at the hunt stables,’ she answered venomously, ‘holding his hand after his night out.’
Concentrating on me, she had not taken in the scene at all. She turned pale as she saw the group on the edge of the copse, the serious faces, the blood-stained swabs on the ground. A police sergeant passed carrying by their barrels, wrapped in his handkerchief, the Colt and the Mauser. She understood too much all at once, and the implications of it overwhelmed control.
‘So you were expecting someone!’
She burst into passionate tears. Not hysteria. Just the intolerable grief of youth escaping from its education.
Georgina held her.
‘I can take it you are not seriously hurt, Charles?’ she asked.
‘No, dear Georgi.’
‘You seem to have been very lucky. Benita, there is no reason to carry on like an Italian whose second cousin has just died of old age.’
‘He was so alone,’ Benita sobbed. ‘Always alone.’
‘My darling, I had to be,’ I answered. ‘But if it weren’t for you I should
be dead.’
Georgina realized that she had no more need to reproach me for stubbornness towards Benita. But she was puzzled. She thought that Benita had in some way averted an attack on me. I tried to explain what I meant: that after surrender to love and the country of one’s love one no longer makes the lonely, empty gestures of a man whose only home is in his pride.
‘Engaged to Benita!’ the admiral exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t be better! I never could understand why you carried on as if you wouldn’t see eighty again. Why, when I was in my forties …’
‘Yes, Peregrine?’ said my aunt.
‘Damn it, Georgi, I was in Budapest on the Danube Commission! Look here, inspector, be a good fellow and keep this under your hat! Miss Gillon is just Nur Jehan’s sister, eh? I mean, it’s her father’s stallion, and that’s the only reason why she is here. You never heard of romance, eh? We don’t want the news hawks bothering them on that one. I give you my word the boy won’t go to trial. But he’s bound to have an awkward week or two.’
The inspector had fallen completely under Cunobel’s charm. He nodded, but remained with pencil poised over his notebook.
‘Miss Gillon did not know the – the other gentleman?’ he asked.
‘Miss Gillon, inspector,’ said Aunt Georgina, ‘was quite unaware that my nephew was sacrificing himself to catch a murderer. Even I myself was partly deceived. Peregrine, I shall speak to you afterwards. There is no doubt in my mind that you knew a great deal more than you were telling me, and I can only hope that at your club or possibly your wine merchant’s –’ we were given to understand that she remembered the Madeira and had put two and two together ‘– you have made the acquaintance of some other confirmed bachelor who is a person of authority in the Home Office.’
‘Yes, Georgi. I know the Assistant Commissioner of Special Branch. But I’m afraid he’s not a bachelor. Is he a bachelor, inspector?’
‘I could not say, sir,’ said the inspector stolidly – he wanted to smile, but he was not risking an engagement with Georgina. ‘Any statement which you wish to make should be given in the first place to Gloucester police.’
Statements. Mr Dennim told me this. Mr Dennim told me that. Well, no doubt in weeks or months they would dig up some direct evidence which Counsel for the prosecution could not so easily ignore.
The ambulance which arrived and pulled alongside the inspector depressed me even more. I should have been glad enough to see it two hours earlier; but now it emphasized the immediacy of the parting from Benita and too sudden a plunge from the savagery of the night into inhuman tranquillity. What had this white, impersonal machine for the mending of bodies to do with a darkness which was more real than the warmth of the sun on my face? I spoke and lived in the present, but the optic nerves were still trying to distinguish my enemy from trees.
‘Almighty Wings, you aren’t going to bung ’em both in together, are you?’ Cunobel protested.
I looked to my left. Saint Sabas, carried on a stretcher, was about to pass behind me.
‘Put me down beside that gentleman,’ he said.
It was a surprisingly clear and definite whisper. The two bearers hesitated. I raised myself on my elbows and looked at him. He was entirely covered by blankets. His once dark face was icy white. The lobe of his left ear was shot away but had stopped bleeding. They had not bothered with that at all in the urgency of his other wounds. He tried to smile.
‘Please put him down,’ I asked.
It never occurred to me to say anything else. That we should speak seemed so natural. What we had shared we had shared.
‘Graf von Dennim, I have lain there thinking about you. I wanted to say that I believe you. I think I did believe you even at the inn. I have had enough to do with officers of the – of the service which duty compelled you to join. They are not men of courage.
‘Apology is a meaningless word for us. And forgiveness, perhaps. But I wish to ask you a question. May I?’
‘Of course.’
‘She only walked? She was quite dead?’
‘She was already dead, Saint Sabas.’
‘Thank you,’ he gasped. ‘You could not know who or what she was. I am proud that when she had nothing more to give she could still help. And now – you said something which made me believe you had respect for my name.’
‘I do.’
With a last hoarse whispering from his indomitable energy he broke into rapid German. He must have spoken it perfectly when he was in a state to remember words.
‘Then I will dare to appeal to you. I do not want to be saved. Your first shot went through me. The kidney, I think. But the damned doctors might patch me up for the scaffold yet. Your second cut the femoral artery. I put on a tourniquet. I thought I might still crawl. Thank God I could not! So at last there was nothing left to do but think.
‘They have put on their own tourniquet. Under the blanket I am about to undo it. The result will be obvious if I am lifted off the ground. Please, if you can, keep me with you a moment.’
Sir Thomas Pamellor was busy giving orders to which no one paid any attention. The inspector, momentarily confused by him, could not intervene effectively. But the evidence of collusion between Saint Sabas and myself was suspicious. So was the interest on the faces of the admiral and Georgina.
‘Were you able to follow what was being said, sir?’ the inspector asked.
‘Never could understand German!’ Cunobel lied. ‘Impossible language!’
‘I am so sorry. Nor do I,’ said Georgina.
‘I’m not going to stand for it, inspector!’ Sir Thomas exclaimed. ‘This is a clear case of attempted murder. I know very well what the Vicomte is going to say. It’s what I’d do myself. A great, Christian gentleman …’
‘I am neither,’ Saint Sabas murmured. ‘Bend down, inspector! Take my statement and do not interrupt! I, Raoul Philippe Humphrey, Vicomte de Saint Sabas, of Saint Sabas in the Department of Maine et Loire, solemnly declare that I endeavoured to kill – to assassinate this gentleman and that he has killed me in self-defence. The motive remains between him and myself. If ever he can bring himself to make it public, he will only do honour to his own name and will give such little as he can to mine.
‘I confess that in Western Germany I killed three war criminals named Gustav Sporn, Walter Dickfuss and Hans Weber. I do not regret it. I regret only that I should have wasted so much of my life upon so worthless a compulsion.
‘I confess, too, with bitter shame and sorrow, that it was I who sent the bomb which killed a postman serving Charles Dennim’s house, and I desire that the welfare of the man’s family shall be a first charge upon my estate. If brought to trial, I should plead insanity. Death is a very kind deliverance, for me as for my dear wife.’
He freed his left hand from the blanket and held it out to Sir Thomas Pamellor.
‘Will you hold my hand a minute – for old friendship?’
‘You – you – you murdered a postman!’ Pamellor stammered.
The hand fell to the ground, so limp that it made an audible little thud.
‘No one,’ Saint Sabas muttered. ‘No one knows enough. Only Dennim.’
‘I have always understood, Savarin,’ I answered.
He drew out his right hand, bright red and dripping, and laid it on the turf between us with the last of his strength. For the few seconds which were left, it was I who held it between my own.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, event
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Copyright © 1979, 2014 by Geoffrey Household
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
978-1-5040-1046-7
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Watcher in the Shadows Page 19
