A Time to Kill

by Geoffrey Household

  I got home soon after three, dragged Cecily out of bed to join me in a drink she didn’t want, and had a look at the contents of the vasculum in a good light. The thorn twigs were well inhabited; there was a score of little black and motionless dots under and on the tips of the leaves. Cecily was rather silent. She tried to echo my note of triumph – for I did feel that I had reason to be proud of my belief in Pink – but she didn’t sound quite real. Like many women who are by nature guarded and thoughtful, her true opinion is to be found not in what she says, but in the inflexions of her voice when she says it.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to Roland straight away?’ she asked.

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ I answered.

  ‘You should have thought of that earlier,’ she said.

  It was an obscure remark, but it made me feel guilty. During the war she was a model Spartan wife. In time of peace, however, avoidable anxiety is not fair.

  I slept heavily and late. She, I gathered, did not; for she told me in the morning that three cars, or the same car three times, had passed our house just before dawn. That was, indeed, a rare event on our country road, but I wasn’t, or refused to be impressed. I considered it quite possible that the stranger, thanks to Pink, had come early from Bournemouth to have a look at my house, and what of it? After all we were in well-policed England, and this time – unlike that very unpleasant night the previous autumn when I was on the run – the police would be on my side.

  Cecily took Jerry and George to school in the village. After that she was going to see the vicar – for some reason it is impossible in the country to indulge in any normal community activity without seeing the vicar – so she said goodbye until the evening. I finished my bacon and eggs, and then picked up the telephone to call my office and to make an appointment with Roland. The line was dead.

  I went outside to see if the wire from my house to the pole had been interfered with. It hadn’t. Then I remembered that the night had been blustery, and I declined to be affected by Cecily’s mood of foreboding. The line, after all, went dead at least once a year. It passed under half a mile of chestnuts which were always drooping their heavy branches over it, in spite of the work of the Post Office linesmen and their saws.

  There was no point in driving up to the village just to find that all the lines, and not only mine, were down; so I set out for Dorchester. I was cautious, but not at all convinced that I had any reason to be. I reckoned that if my telephone had really been cut by some crazy outfit, normally inhabiting the world of Pink, their only purpose was to gain time to escape. The game was up for them, and any strong-arm stuff would merely set the whole machinery of the police in action. I took only one precaution, and that was to unload Pink’s gun in case I had to frighten someone with it.

  I also intended to drive pretty fast, but that I could not do. Half a mile from my house I caught up a plain, dusty black van which would not let me pass. Even this was not conclusive. On our twisting roads a slow and nervous driver can hold up the car behind him for bend after bend. Then the van stopped in the middle of the road and spilled out two men from the double doors at the back.

  They darted straight at my car. I was out of it on the instant, and held them up with Pink’s gun. They gave me no trouble. I was a bit of an expert in house-to-house fighting towards the end of the war, and for a naturally peaceful man I can put on a convincing show of ferocity. These two chaps were well trained, too. They kept their hands up, and their eyes on my face without flickering off for a moment; and that, since another couple were creeping up behind me, must have been difficult.

  The spacing of the attack was perfect. The other two had been hiding behind the hedge just round the corner of an open gate. I had only just time to half-turn my head when my arms were grasped, and a pad of some anaesthetic forced over my face. There was so little chance to put up an effective struggle that I wasn’t even hurt beyond a few bruises. My arms and legs were securely held, and the more I heaved, the more I inhaled that damned chloroform mixture.

  When I recovered consciousness I was on the floor of the van, neatly tied up and fairly comfortably settled on a pile of sacking. I don’t think I had been laid out for more than a few minutes, for I felt well enough after all the vivid dreams had cleared away. The stranger from Bournemouth and another man were with me. They had the vasculum. I decided that there was nothing whatever to be gained by anger or protest.

  ‘How the devil do you think you are going to get away with this?’ I asked as reasonably as I could manage. ‘You aren’t in Russia, you know.’

  ‘In Russia there is fortunately no need for this violence,’ the stranger answered.

  Well, I suppose he was right. The population must be even more law-abiding than in England. They’d better be.

  ‘But, my dear sir,’ I told him, ‘my office, my wife, everybody will be looking for me.’

  ‘Naturally! And so I shall not keep you more than a few hours.’

  ‘You’ll have the police after you before that.’

  ‘It is possible,’ he replied with a half-smile that held in it a weary fatalism. ‘But you did not want to appeal to the police last night, and I do not think you can have done so since.’

  ‘And what about my car?’

  ‘That? That has been driven away. I needed it. I will explain to you later.’

  It is curious how one attaches quite a different meaning to the same face according to the circumstances in which one sees it. I had first thought of this man as fussy and eager and considering himself too intelligent for Bournemouth. Then, as we walked together to my car, I put him down as some grubby sort of foreign agent. Now I saw that he was a man of a certain melancholy power, as cool and concentrated as some professional bridge-player calculating how far his poor hand can be used to wreck his opponents. Yet all the time I was looking at the same face, with its sharp nose and thin mouth, and eyes set exceptionally close together so that his gaze focused for exact clarity of the object before him, to the exclusion of all vaguer shadows at the side.

  His real name I do not know. His assistants addressed him, with considerable respect, as Yegor Ivanovitch. That Russian custom of using the patronymic instead of the surname must be most useful in revolutionary circles. From the moment I woke up in the van he never made any attempt to hide the fact that he was a Russian security officer. Indeed, he had every interest in letting me know it. We were, from his point of view, unwilling allies.

  I lay on the sacking for about three-quarters of an hour of fairly fast driving. We passed through no big town. I noticed in the last phase, a short, steep hill with sharp bends; then a mile or two of straight and a turning. At this point the other chap in the van stuffed my ears with cotton-wool and pulled a black bag over my head. Ivanovitch assured me that I need fear nothing.

  Now we went down a long slope over a roughish road; and after it, just before we stopped, came an abrupt leap upwards which I took to be the drive into a house. I was carried out of the van and down some steep steps. I was then set free of bag, ear-plugs, cords and all, and found myself in a basement room or cellar, carpeted and fitted up with table and chairs. It had no windows, and was lit by a modern paraffin lamp.

  Yegor Ivanovitch offered me a drink with the unmistakable neutrality of a policeman. His manners, perhaps, simulated cordiality more lightly than those of Scotland Yard. He seemed to consider drinking a ceremony which had its own rules, however unpleasant the business to follow. Of that I was glad, for I badly needed a moment’s relaxation.

  ‘And now,’ he said, offering me a chair at the table, and taking one himself at the opposite side, ‘let us have a talk. You have done me a great favour.’

  I didn’t much care for this surprising opening, or for my position on the wrong side of his temporary desk; so I smiled and said nothing.

  ‘These “moths” you were collecting …’ he went on. ‘But it seems that everything else you told me last night was true?’

  ‘Within reason,’ I answered.


  ‘Within reason, of course. It may interest you to know that I have made a careful study of English police methods?’

  He had a habit, which laid a polite veneer over interrogation, of making a casual, plain statement and ending the sentence as if it were a question.

  ‘I hope you have profited by them.’

  ‘Profited? No. They cannot be adapted to our greater economic freedom. I was going to tell you only that I know your police never break the law.’

  ‘Sometimes they must,’ I answered, hoping that he would take me to have acted in an official capacity.

  ‘Never! Nor your secret police either, such as they are. No, Mr Taine, you don’t belong to them. I think you must be just a friend of Commander …’ and he gave Pink’s real name.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘A little more responsible than that.’

  Score one for him. I was so anxious to make myself out a person of importance who would be missed at once that I had admitted Pink’s identity.

  He did not show the least awareness of his success.

  ‘More responsible? One of his fascists then?’

  ‘I’m damned if I was!’

  He begged my pardon effusively. However well he knew us, he could not guess that to most Englishmen the word fascist was more comic than insulting.

  ‘This anarchistic, individual patriotism is hard for me to understand,’ he said. ‘There are so many of you English who will act for your country without orders, and never care if you are disowned afterwards. Mr Taine, I am going to assume that you have no sort of official position?’

  ‘If it suits you.’

  ‘Now why should we fence? Let us be allies as during the war. Yes, in this I am sure I may consider us allies.’

  ‘Better be careful you aren’t shot when you get home,’ I said.

  ‘Shot? Why? I should not be shot if I made a mistake. I should be sent to work for my country wherever work was hard and unpleasant. Mr Taine, I have been watching that criminal Losch for some weeks.’

  ‘Odd we never saw each other,’ I remarked.

  I couldn’t get a single shot on the target. He just laughed.

  ‘But I am telling you the truth!’ he assured me. ‘And because we never did meet, I know that you and the commander have hardly watched at all. Please try to be frank with me as I am with you.’

  He offered me another drink which I refused, and then adjusted the lamp. It was vile to remember that there was a Dorset summer day outside.

  ‘I am so sorry. I am afraid the light has been in your eyes,’ he said. ‘Mr Taine, I give you my word that I and my staff were sent to England to find those ticks and prevent them being used. My inquiries led me to suspect Losch, but I could not be sure – until the commander interrupted us last night. Please do not believe that we Russians have horns and hooves. We are men like you. We do not come out of police romances. We do not spread diseases.’

  ‘It would be so awkward if you were caught,’ I replied, remembering Roland’s chief objection to believing a word of Pink’s story.

  ‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘And there is another thing you must understand. The relations between our government and the new People’s Democracies are not at all what you think. We cannot compel obedience. We can only advise and apply a tactful pressure. These Germans and Poles and Czechs – we have no more power over them than your own parliament over the legislatures of crown colonies. Were you ever in civil affairs in Germany?’

  ‘No, thank God!’

  ‘It is a pity. You would have realized our difficulties. We cannot make communists of the Germans, Mr Taine. We can only make soldiers. And you will never make of them your so-called democrats. You will only make soldiers. They have no sense of politics, no sense of anything but to impose their hysterical will. This’ – he touched Pink’s vasculum which was strapped to his waist – ‘is their doing, not ours.’

  ‘What about the Colorado beetle story?’ I retorted. ‘Don’t tell me your propaganda people didn’t think that one up!’

  ‘I think it probable. What else could they do? Suppose I had not got on to the track of Losch in time, whom would you have blamed when you found out the cause of your dying cattle? For the sake of all who trust us to give them a world of freedom, we had to have a story ready. Colorado beetles!’ – he laughed with a note of pity – ‘an invention good enough for the masses as they are – but not, Mr Taine, for the masses as they will be.’

  ‘What are you going to do with Losch?’ I asked.

  ‘I had a short interview with him last night after I left you. He is a party member and will obey. He will go to Russia in my care.’

  That seemed to me a grim and entirely fitting journey for Losch. Lord help me, I was inclined to think quite kindly of Ivanovitch! The extreme daring and efficiency with which he and his little band of agents operated in a foreign country compelled admiration.

  ‘You propose that I should go too?’ I asked.

  ‘Whenever you wish, Mr Taine, I shall be delighted to see that you are given a visa. But all I want now is your help. And I am sure I will get it. This matter, you see, is now cleared up. When I left Losch, the thorns were burning in his fireplace. This case of yours I have. And in a week or two there will be nothing in Tangier to worry either of us. This absurd, unauthorized weapon in what you call the cold war will be as if it had never existed.’

  The commander?’

  ‘An ex-fascist, a paid jackal, a murderer and now a bandit,’ he answered with a contemptuous hatred that boded ill for Pink. ‘Would anyone in their senses believe him?’

  ‘But he has been believed,’ I said.

  ‘No, Mr Taine, he has not; if he had, Losch would be in the hands of the police, or every contact of his watched day and night. No, no, I can avoid all unpleasantness if you are silent. And why should you not be? I am sure you do not wish to make trouble between allies.’

  I replied cautiously that no one wished to make unnecessary trouble, and that if his Embassy were to explain the true position as he had explained it to me, any action taken would certainly be discreet and unofficial. We all knew the capacity of Germans for running wild.

  ‘That is most friendly,’ he said. ‘I knew that I could count on you. But there are difficulties. My little party, with Losch, must leave the country. And then we must have time to handle Holberg ourselves. That means, I fear, that I must ensure your silence.’

  ‘I tell you straight that if I’m not seen again and soon, Pink’s story will be believed,’ I said.

  ‘Of course. That is obvious,’ Yegor Ivanovitch replied. ‘Besides, I have no right to detain you. It would not be ethical. No, but I am bound to insist that you keep silent for, say, a couple of weeks.’

  ‘That’s an impossible request. I won’t.’

  ‘I think you will. Excuse me a moment.’

  He went out, holding the door open long enough for me to see that there were a couple of solid-looking toughs outside it, one of whom had been with him in the van. Ivanovitch must have been given his pick from the whole of his service, for every one of his men could pass as British in appearance and language.

  That room was like a tomb. I could hear nothing whatever. The four whitewashed walls were round me, blank and unbroken by any object but a loudspeaker high up in a corner. I thought of knocking the lamp over, but there was nothing which would burn except the carpet and myself. I thought of hiding behind the door and laying out Yegor Ivanovitch when he returned. That didn’t lead to anything constructive either. I lit a pipe and sat down, and tried to imagine some way by which my silence could be ensured without killing or keeping me.

  Ivanovitch returned after about a quarter of an hour. The two men outside entered the room with him.

  ‘You must now prepare yourself for a shock,’ he said. ‘But please remember that we Russians have most gentle and kindly hearts, and that you have nothing to be alarmed about. I want you to listen to that loudspeaker.’

  He touched a switch beneath i
t. I couldn’t for a moment make out the sound I heard; then it was clearly a child sobbing. I looked at the three men, puzzled. The child was sobbing in a rhythm very like George’s; but still I could not understand.

  Then Jerry’s voice came through, as firmly as if he were in the room. He was playing the bold man for all his seven years were worth, and imitating the very tone in which I would comfort either of them when they were upset for no good reason.

  ‘Don’t cry!’ he said. ‘If Daddy sent the car for us, Daddy must be here.’

  I gathered my feet under me and smashed the nearest Russian. It did me a bit of good to see him spitting blood, but the savagery was utterly futile. Yegor Ivanovitch had his pistol trained on me. He did not even look at his hurt man. The discipline in that team was absolute.

  ‘If you make me kill you, they can never go back to their mother,’ he reminded me. ‘Sit down!’

  I sat down.

  ‘They locked the door,’ George wept.

  ‘I don’t suppose they did really,’ Jerry answered. ‘Use your handkerchief!’

  I was so proud of him. I would have sold my soul to the devil.

  ‘Enough?’ asked Ivanovitch.

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘I had better tell you what happened,’ he said, ‘so that you will know the explanations you must give. My assistants took your car and called for the children at the school, saying that you wanted them home for lunch. The mistress knew your car, of course. Why should she question it? A mad risk to take, yes – but I have had so little time for planning. Mr Taine, we are both very lucky. If you had not taken the road to Dorchester this morning, you would have been shot from the roadside between your house and the village. If I had not got your children, you would be shot now. But at last we can breathe. We have time. Time,’ he repeated with a gasp of thankfulness.

  ‘How much time do you need?’ I asked.