=* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook *=

This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions.
These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the eBook
(other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are
making commercial use of the eBook. If either of these conditions
applies, please contact a https://www.fadedpage.com administrator before
proceeding. Thousands more FREE eBooks are available at
https://www.fadedpage.com.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright
in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's
copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT
DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

_Title:_ Hunter Hunted
_Date of first publication:_ 1957
_Author:_ Henry Treece (1911-1966)
_Date first posted:_ July 13, 2026
_Date last updated:_ July 13, 2026
Faded Page eBook #20260728

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Pat McCoy & the online
Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net





                          [Cover Illustration]




                          _by the same author_

                                   *

                           DESPERATE JOURNEY
                           ASK FOR KING BILLY
                               THE EXILES
                           THE HAUNTED GARDEN
                           THE BLACK SEASONS
                         INVITATION AND WARNING




                             HUNTER HUNTED

                                  _by_

                              HENRY TREECE

                            _illustrated by_
                            RICHARD KENNEDY

                          FABER AND FABER LTD
                           24 Russell Square
                                 London

 [Transcriber Note: Illustrations are not included in this ebook due to
                       copyright considerations.]




                      _First published in mcmlvii_
                      _by Faber and Faber Limited_
                    _24 Russell Square London W.C.1_
                     _Printed in Great Britain by_
                   _Latimer Trend & Co Ltd Plymouth_
                         _All rights reserved_




                  All people, places and institutions
                   in this story are intended by the
                        author to be fictitious.




                                Contents

     1. MAN IN A RAINCOAT                                     _page_ 11
     2. COUNTRY CLUB                                                 17
     3. MEETING IN PROGRESS                                          21
     4. A TALE TOLD                                                  31
     5. IN THE NET                                                   37
     6. STRANGE MEETING                                              43
     7. QUARRY ENCOUNTERED                                           52
     8. MATADOR AND SILENCER                                         62
     9. REPRIEVE                                                     68
    10. THE PLOT THICKENS                                            75
    11. BELTENHAM HALL                                               81
    12. AMONG THE TENDRILS                                           87
    13. PASS-ON AT PORCHESTER                                       100
    14. THE SPOTTED COW AND THE BUDGERIGARS                         105
    15. BACK ALLEY BOYS                                             115
    16. SURPRISE RETURN                                             120
    17. INVITATION TO A JOURNEY                                     127
    18. SALVATION AND A DOCTOR                                      129
    19. THE LIGHTED WINDOW                                          135
    20. SAM                                                         140
    21. SIEGE                                                       149
    22. BURNT OAK                                                   165
    23. APOLOGIA                                                    170
    24. DAI AND MYFANWY                                             174
    25. THE GARAGE ON THE BRIDGE                                    180
    26. RESTLESS PEACE                                              189
    27. FATEFUL DAY                                                 197
    28. THE STORM CLOUDS GATHER                                     204
    29. THE STORM BREAKS                                            210
    30. AMPHITHEATRE                                                215
    31. EPILOGUE                                                    220




                             HUNTER HUNTED


                                 _One_
                           Man in a Raincoat

At first, all I could see was Jimmy Pugh’s nose. It appeared
rhythmically and then disappeared again, over the top of a rather dingy
grey towel which he flapped at me vigorously. It was not a very
beautiful nose, I decided, as I lolled back on my stool; altogether too
flat and shapeless. It bore a patient, punished look, I thought, as I
gazed up into the blue smoke that swirled about the bright electric
light above the ring. Too many fists had found their mark on it, in too
many resin-and-leather encounters. Poor Jimmy Pugh, I sighed. How sad a
fate, to end up as a University boxing coach! Alas, alas, alas!

Jimmy Pugh’s nose came at me without warning. The tired-looking towel
had stopped flapping. Then I even saw Jimmy Pugh’s eyes, small and
serious, grey gimlets. They were boring right through me. He seemed
quite angry, for him.

“For Pete’s sake, snap out of it, sir,” he said, “or we shall be
_carrying_ you out, inside sixty seconds. That man opposite you is a
killer. He means to have you down next round. You’re not playing
kiss-in-the-ring, sir; _this is an Inter-club Championship_!”

I tried to smile through thickened lips and to reassure Jimmy that
everything in the little square garden of canvas was well, but he was
pushing my gum-shield in again and I couldn’t talk then. A spongeful of
icy cold water trickled over the back of my neck and down my back. I
shivered. Then I felt that towel wiping the surplus moisture off my
shoulders. I sensed my stool being pulled from under me. I heard a nasty
little “ting” as the gong went for the next round. It gave me quite a
lonely sensation, that bell.

“For goodness’ sake, earn your keep!” said Jimmy, trying to look sternly
at me. But he couldn’t keep it up. I winked at him, though I didn’t feel
like winking.

Then somehow I was in the middle of the ring once more, surrounded by a
whitish blur of faces, hearing a subdued hum of voices and the resined
squeak of my opponent’s shoes as he came over the canvas to finish the
contest quickly.

He was a big, dark, raw-boned Scot, his hair cropped close at the sides,
giving it a bluish look. The light-heavyweight champion of Metropolitan,
with hardly a mark on him after fifty fights. I noticed that his nose
still held to the shape Nature intended, unlike poor Jimmy’s—and what
was more, there was a curious, almost whimsical smile on his lips as he
slithered at me, as though he was saying, “Sorry, chum, this is going to
hurt you more than it will me, but what can I do about it?”

I appreciated that kindly feeling, in a strange way, and almost felt I
would like to say, “Go ahead, old boy. Don’t mind me!”

But the old temptation was too great. As he drew back his vicious right
to put an end to the affair, he left himself just that bit too wide
open. Even I could see that, dazed as I was. Indeed, it was the only
thing I did see, and I observed it for a split second with a quiet and
clinical accuracy. I saw no point in waiting, and brought over my own
right, short and crisp, with hardly a curve in it. The shock up my arm
was more than I expected. I heard an “Ooh!” on all sides among the
audience. Then I saw my opponent fall forward on to his knees, his head
almost touching the canvas.

I had just sense enough to stand away and to back into the corner
farthest from him, although my inclination was to help him up! During
the timeless silence, he tried twice to get to his feet, glaring at me
glassily as he did so. But at the third attempt, his arms buckled under
him and he fell, spread-eagled, out to the world, his fighting all over
for that evening.

Then I heard Jimmy Pugh calling out, “Smasho! Just what the doctor
ordered! Come on, lad, and sit down!”

I sank on to the stool while he unlaced my gloves and threw that towel
over my shoulders. We were amateurs and did not sport the coloured silk
dressing-gowns that enlivened the professional ring. I looked over
Jimmy’s shoulder and saw his second guiding my opponent back to his
corner. His legs were wobbling and he seemed to have lost interest in
things generally.

“My, but that was an almighty clout,” said Jimmy, grimacing. “I’d rather
miss a week’s pay than get in the way of that one!”

“Oh, stop kidding,” I said. “I think I bust my hand doing it!”

Jimmy grinned again. “Well,” he said, “a bust hand is worth it. You’ve
won the championship for the University, and that should add up to
something!”

I gave him a playful dig in the ribs and then was immediately afraid
that he’d give me one in return. If he had done, I should have measured
my length, for Jimmy was one of the old-timers, with a fist like a lump
of bog-oak and muscles up his sweater the size of young footballs. He
was merciful and did not retaliate.

“You can buy me a pint for that later,” he said, smiling wickedly. It
was his time-honoured retort.

“Right,” I said, and went across to my opponent’s corner. They had put a
wet cloth on his neck and he was fully conscious again. He forced a grin
and held out his hand to me.

“Thanks for the dance,” he said. “I’d like another one with you later in
the season.”

I admired his pluck. “You’ll return the compliment next time,” I said.

“Shouldn’t wonder at that,” he answered, “but I’ll have to bring a
hammer into my corner to do it!”

I climbed out of the ring and ran into the University fly-weight, who
had finished and dressed earlier in the evening, having put his man down
straight away. He slapped my shoulder. “Good show,” he said. “I never
thought you’d make it. Oh, by the way, there’s someone in the
dressing-room asking for you. Seemed quite anxious.”

“Male or female?” I asked, smiling.

He snorted with pretended disgust. “I imagine it’s Jack Solomons with a
fat contract for you to meet the American world-champion,” he said. “Or
it might be a character in a coon-skin cap—I didn’t notice. But it’s
urgent, by the look of it. I should go!”

I went along the aisle to the far end of the hall, up the passage-way
and into the dressing-room set aside for the University team.

All of our fellows were out in the hall, watching the last bout, so the
dressing-room was empty, except for my visitor. He stood at the far end
of the room, in the shadows away from the light. He was a slightly built
man, wearing a light raincoat, his soft hat pulled well over his eyes. I
stared at him, wondering who should speak first. He did . . . if you
could call his measured nasal whine speaking.

“Get your clothes on, china,” he said. “I’ve got no time to waste.”

[Illustration]

His tone annoyed me suddenly, nor did I care for the slow snarl of his
voice. After my recent victory, I felt that I should be treated with a
little more consideration. After all, you don’t win a championship every
day, or even every other day.

So I said, “Take it easy, Bogart. You mean nothing to me. Why you should
barge in here and order me to dress I don’t know, and I don’t care, old
boy. Now, what do you want? I’m busy.”

He moved forward out of the shadows and I saw that his pale lips were
smiling. It was not a pleasant smile to see, either.

“I said get dressed,” he repeated. “I mean that. Get dressed, and don’t
keep me waiting.”

That was too much for me, strained as I was. I rose from my bench and
stepped towards him, my right hand half-cocked. Then I saw that he had a
razor in his hand, held so that the blade was ready to be swept across
my chest or face. And _his_ hand was as steady as a rock, there was no
mistaking that. He had not budged an inch before my threatened attack. I
knew that I must do as he said or take the gory consequences. I sat down
and pulled on my shirt and trousers. There is sense in all things.

“That’s right,” he said quite amiably. “There’s no point in getting
nasty, is there, china! Sorry I can’t give you time to get a shower, but
I might lose you if I let you out of this room.”

“What do you want?” I asked, struggling with my socks.

He grinned in a twisted way. “You’ll hear that from someone else, not
me,” he said. “My orders were just to _bring you in_, that’s all.”

He walked behind me to the street door, his hand still holding the razor
before him, in case I might change my mind. But I knew better than to
risk such a stupid thing. I went out into the street. I was very annoyed
indeed, but I didn’t like the look of that razor. Besides, I was tired,
after all. It makes a difference.


                                 _Two_
                              Country Club

An innocent-looking little green Morris Minor stood in the light of a
street-lamp. As we approached it, the front door swung open.

“Get in,” said my visitor. “That’s right, next to the driver. Don’t try
any silly business with him. I’m sitting right behind you, and I shall
keep Alice out!”

I couldn’t help saying, “Why Alice?”

I heard him grunt behind me. “She’s the girl who takes you into
Wonderland,” he said. “Where were you dragged up?”

Then I was in the car, conscious of the huge shape of the silent driver;
conscious also of my visitor’s warm breath on the back of my neck. I
shuddered, thinking of Alice, that vicious little razor.

“Nice and cosy, these buses,” said the man in the light raincoat. “Not
like some of them Rolls jobs where you have to communicate with the
other passengers by postcard when you hold a conversation.”

The driver growled, “Oh, stow it, Joey! They told you to bring this
fellow in; they didn’t say torture him with your funny cross-talk.”

I said, “Thanks. You obviously have a sense of humour!”

The driver growled again. “And you shut up, too. I like to concentrate
on my job, I do.”

Indeed, he made it the sort of job one _has_ to concentrate on. He swung
the little Morris about as though it were a yo-yo on a string. He
treated traffic lights with the gay abandon of a young American hurdler
who has a race to win. He passed beneath the noses of heavy and stolid
Birmingham buses like a gad-fly, deaf to the blistering comments which
floated down from the driving-seats above him. Yet he was not a _bad_
driver—just a very reckless one who paid no heed, it seemed, to any
man-made rules and regulations.

Raincoat in the back seemed to sense my consternation. “He used to drive
an armoured car, china,” he said. “It’s made him a bit wheel-happy,
that’s all. When he gets a job in anything as small as a Morris Minor,
well, he just slings it round his finger. Has no end of fun!”

“It’s good to know that someone has the fun,” I said, drawing my finger
round the neck of my shirt, which somehow had become too tight for me.

“No sense of fun,” growled the driver, half-glancing at me. “All right,
we’ll go slow just to please you.”

He turned the car into a long straight road that led out of Birmingham
and pressed the speed up to a steady sixty. The arc-lamps above us
seemed to fuse into one beam. The trees planted along the dividing verge
of the road melted into a hedge. I sighed in resignation; the only hope
I had now was for a police car to draw out of a side-road and flag us
down for speeding. But that did not happen.

Then I felt that the air in the car was getting thick and I began to
grope for the window-winder. As I did so the driver coughed in warning
and immediately the man behind me said viciously, “Sit up, china! You’ll
lose an ear if you try that one again!”

I said, “You’re nervous, you two. I only wanted air!”

“Nark it,” said the driver. “You’d break your perishin’ neck getting out
at this speed. We’ve got to keep you alive for a little while longer at
least.”

This was the last straw! I was suddenly incensed by the self-satisfied
way in which these two thugs assumed they could treat me. What was more,
I sensed something artificial about the whole proceedings, something too
much like a third-rate gangster film to be convincing. I decided that
there was no really good reason why these two men, whom I did not know,
should treat me in this manner. I weighed it up—one of them was
occupied at the wheel. The other was probably playing the part of a
tough guy, as seen from the ninepennies at his local cinema in Deritend
or Aston Cross.

To make my anger more frightening, as I thought, I chose my time and
then, letting out the loudest roar I could muster, I swung round,
dodging sideways and intending to punch the razor-man into a quiet
oblivion against the back-cushions of the car.

But I had worked it all out incorrectly. The moment I moved, the fat
driver slapped his foot down on the brakes. I shot forward, powerlessly,
to hit my head on the base of the windscreen. In the small crumb of
consciousness that stayed with me then, I saw the man in the light
raincoat lean over and raise his arm. And in that same speck of
consciousness, I heard the driver’s thick voice say, “Hold it, chum.
He’s had it for the moment.” Then I _knew_ they meant it, and passed out
for a while, strangely disinterested.

When I came round, we were still going quite fast, but along a secondary
road. There were no bright lights, and the houses were few and isolated.
They were of the solid, tree-girt type, some of them in mock-Tudor
styles, beloved of retired coal-hauliers in search of cultured rest.

I rubbed the side of my head. “Where are we?” I asked. “Is this Hall
Green?”

The driver said, “Could be. How’s your bump?”

I said, “Not so bad, you maniac. You might have killed me.”

The man behind me chuckled. “You asked for it, china. We warned you.
After all, we have a job to do. It’s bread and butter to us—kids to
feed and all that.”

I said, “Well, you’re the strangest gangsters I ever heard of.”

The driver said, “Oh, stow it! We’re not gangsters. Just workmen with a
job to do. We don’t want you to beat us up, so we beat you up first. All
right?”

I began to argue but the man in the light raincoat said, “Look, sonny,
we saw you fight to-night. We take no chances. Now try to smarten
yourself up a bit, we are getting near the place we want.”

Set back from the roadway, at the far end of a wide gravel car park
surrounded by ornamental bushes, was a low white building, gay with red
and yellow neon lights. I read the words, “_The Green Man Country
Club_”. The park was full of expensive cars which glistened in the
bright glare. There was an air of wealth about the place. Dance music
from a small and no doubt select band floated towards us. We swung into
the crunching park and stopped. “All change,” said the man with the
razor. “This is it!”


                                _Three_
                          Meeting in Progress

We did not go through the open front door, beyond which I saw men in
dinner jackets talking to women in frilly evening-frocks, laughing,
holding glasses in their hands. Instead, we passed round the side of the
low white club house, and along a loggia festooned with flowering
creepers. Away to my left, in the moonlight, I saw the shadowy hills of
the west beginning, the hills of Shropshire and Hereford. It would have
been a beautiful setting, if only one could have visited the place for
pleasure, and not as a grim necessity.

“Come on, this way,” said the driver, leading me into a cream-panelled
passage-way. We stopped before a pale-blue door, on which was pinned a
small notice: “_Meeting in progress. Keep out, please._”

The man in the light raincoat knocked four times on the door, in a
peculiar little rhythm, and waited. A high voice from within said, “Send
him in, Joey.”

My guards opened the blue door, pushed me inside, and then faded away,
back down the cream passage-way. The door closed behind me and I blinked
in the brightly-lit room.

Three men in masks stared towards me, across a white-wood table, against
a rich background of maroon brocaded paper and gilt wall-brackets. Each
had a glass before him.

I was so overcome by the theatrical atmosphere of the occasion that I’m
afraid my sense of the ridiculous tempted me. “So the Black Hand Gang
strikes again, eh?” I said. I made an effort to smile as I spoke, to
give an effect of nonchalance, of unconcern. But the silence that met my
remark cut into my jocularity like a razor blade—a razor blade made of
particularly keen ice. I suddenly felt rather small, in spite of my
sense of outraged liberty.

“We are delighted to observe that you have a sense of fun, my friend,”
said the man who sat opposite me. “It is a helpful attribute in times of
stress.”

My eyes were fixed on his hands. They were long white hands, carefully
tended. Their finger-tips were pressed lightly together, almost in an
attitude of prayer. They looked very cold too—as cold as the voice that
spoke above them.

I raised my eyes towards the face of the speaker. By contrast with the
black velvet of the mask, it looked pale and ascetic, the face of a
thinker, a scholar, almost—thin, strongly etched with lines about the
mouth, and very firm. The whole effect was of hardness; the eyes that
looked at me through the holes of the mask were grey, steel-grey; the
carefully brushed hair above the mask was grey, steel-grey too. Even the
well-cut lounge suit that clothed this austere figure was grey. I almost
felt like congratulating him on his fine taste—he might easily have
been wearing an old sports coat, and then the whole sinister effect
would have been lost!

But there was no time for such observations. I was tired and very cross.
I felt that I should come to the point.

“I’m glad you like a bit of fun,” I said, “but don’t let your taste for
it lead you astray. You have put me to a deal of trouble to-night, and
I’m in no mood for it. I’ve had a busy day and I want nothing more than
to drink up my nice warm glass of milk and sink into a dreamless
slumber. I’m afraid you must find another little playmate if you want
any more fun with masks and gangsters to-night. I’m going, and you can
think yourselves lucky that I don’t give you all in charge for
abduction, or whatever they call it when harmless citizens are
shanghaied with razors into Morris Minors.”

I half-turned from the table. “Good night,” I said, moving towards the
blue door.

As I swung round I caught a glimpse of the grey man nodding to the one
who sat on his right. I heard the quick rustle his movement made and I
swayed sideways, with that sixth sense which comes from training in the
square ring. A big hand shot past my face, then seemed to recollect
itself and grabbed again, catching me by the shoulder before I could
swing away. There was no mistaking the strength of that grip; I was
caught.

I looked up at a massively built man, in a fawn gaberdine suit and
wearing a broad red and yellow tie. His face and thick neck were the
colour of old leather—something suitable for slippers in a Moroccan
bazaar, I found myself thinking. A faint scent of cigar smoke came from
his clothes as he took a firmer grip on me. I was not a bit surprised
when he spoke and I heard the flat nasal tones of the American Mid-West.

“Take it easy, son,” the voice said. “You mustn’t go round getting hurt
any more to-night. I see you have an egg-sized addition to your dome
already!”

I felt that this was the last straw. I would have to try out that right
cross-counter again, unless this man let go straightway. I knew where I
would plant it—just above the mid-way button on his white nylon shirt.
That would bring the mountain down, I thought. But I gave him another
chance.

“If you don’t let me go immediately, my friend,” I said, as evenly as I
could, “you will develop sudden stomach symptoms that Alka-Seltzer will
do nothing to help!”

He chuckled, a big deep bear-like chuckle, and almost in spite of myself
I drew my right fist back, just the necessary nine inches.

[Illustration]

“You asked for it, Elmer,” I said quietly.

Then, in sudden surprise, I heard myself grunt with pain and felt my
right arm being twisted behind my back in a grip that I knew I was
powerless to break.

The American said, “Thanks for the warning, chum. A real English
gentleman, I must say! Now sit down and take it easy, like I said
before.”

I was glad to sink into the white-wood chair in front of the table. The
big man leaned over me and smiled. I saw the gold tooth that glimmered
like a column of magnificence in the cavern of his mouth.

“Sorry it had to be like that, son,” he said, “but I’m a sight too old
to let young mavericks go hornin’ me around the corral now! Got to take
precautions, son!”

I had almost hated him a moment before; now I wasn’t quite sure—he made
the whole thing seem so much more reasonable by his slow prairie drawl,
by his curiously open smile.

I heard a cluck of annoyance from across the table. It came from the
third man, who sat at the left of the grey eminence. I took in his dark
complexion, his thin and clipped black moustache, the mobility of his
lips. I would have staked my last sixpence that this was a Frenchman. I
was not mistaken.

“My friends,” he said, moving his hands gently away from each other.
“Oh, my friends, please let us _discuter_; it is a matter of some
urgency, _vous savez_. Let us not waste moments in horseplay of this
nature. We are here for business, you understand.”

Once more, I am afraid, my sense of the stupid led me astray.

“Ah, the talent scout for the _Folies Bergère_,” I said. “Enchanted to
meet you, Monsieur. And how is the Left Bank looking at this time of
year?”

He turned away from me with a grunt of irritation.

“I thought you said this young man was a person of intelligence, of
sensibility?” he said to the one in grey.

The elderly chairman of this strange tribunal sighed and pushed a
neatly-bound folder of papers from him.

“He belies his dossier, I’m afraid,” he said, with a curious expression
of resignation.

Now I sat up with a jerk. So I had a dossier, had I? I reached forward
for the sheaf of papers. No one stopped me.

“I’d like to see this,” I said. “I had no idea that a Police State had
crept up on us overnight!”

The man in grey bowed his head slightly and said, “This is not a police
matter. Your record has been built up privately, for private
consumption. You will find it accurate.”

I read those thin blue sheets, and as I did my head whirled with the
thoroughness of the observations contained in them:

      “William Charles Frankland, born in 1934 at Bewdley,
      Worcestershire. Pupil at Childe’s School, Cleobury Mortimer,
      until 1952; Senior Prefect, 1951; Victor Ludorum, 1950,
      1951; Cricket Captain, 1949, 1950; State Scholarship in
      History, English and French, 1952. Second Class Honours in
      History, Birmingham University, 1955; President of the
      University Conservative Association, 1954; Captain of
      Boxing, 1953, 1954. . . .”

And so the facts and dates went on, covering my Army Service and
promotions, the posts held, the places visited, the sports records
attained. They even had my height and weight, and a photograph of me,
reprinted from a newspaper, at a sports meeting.

I flipped over the other sheets; they were headed “Personality
assessment”, “Intelligence assessment”, and so on, each one a carefully
prepared analysis of some stranger to me—called William Charles
Frankland.

I pushed the papers back. I even smiled, a little grimly, I recall. They
certainly knew most of what there was to know about me, but they didn’t
know the final, important thing—what was in my mind as I sat there
facing them.

“Right,” I said, “you’ve been to a lot of trouble. Now what do you
expect to gain by it? Where do you go from here?”

As I waited for a reply, I heard that small and select band playing from
the rose-lit ballroom, not so far away. For a moment, my tired mind
relaxed and I listened to the tune wailed out by that solitary and no
doubt select saxophone—“Smoke gets in your eyes.” It brought back a
place we had all visited in Aden, fellows from my platoon, on a last
binge before we sailed. A fiddle had been playing that tune then. I
remembered the thick smoke in the atmosphere and the bead curtains that
jangled whenever any one came in. And at last I recalled an
olive-skinned Syrian girl, with fear in her dark eyes, who leaned over
our table as she passed by with her burly escort and whispered, “Save
me, I am a prisoner. Save me, English soldiers!”

I remembered how two of us got up then and followed the girl and her
companion until they were out of that horrible hot-house atmosphere.
Then we marched up and took the man by the shoulder. He was very fat and
quite smart in his white suit and red tarboosh. He wore a heavy gold
wrist-strap to his watch, I recall. We said, “You must let this young
lady go.” While we spoke, she looked up at us with wide and innocent
eyes as though she had never seen us before.

Then the man in the red fez nodded into the darkness and there was a
sudden scurry behind us from the alleyway. We woke up ten minutes later
when our soldier-friends were dragging us back to camp, and we hadn’t a
penny between us. Our watches, fountain pens, everything had
gone—everything but our identity discs!

I thought: “I’ll never forget that tune!”

Then I heard the big American’s voice behind me. He said, “Strange, a
man could be shot while that music is going on, and no one would ever
hear the pistol.”

I came back with a start. The grey-haired man was staring into my eyes
and speaking, his white finger-tips still pressed together.

“I will answer your question, my friend,” he was saying. “What do we
expect to gain from it? We expect to persuade you to do a job of work
for us, that is all.”

I said, “But there is nothing in that dossier by which you could, let us
say, blackmail me.”

He smiled and shook his head. “My dear young man,” he replied,
patiently, as one might speak to a stupid child, “we do not blackmail
anyone. We are not, as _you_ might say, crooks.”

I stared at him in astonishment. “Then what the deuce are you?” I asked.

The three men exchanged glances and smiled, as though at some private
joke which I must not share. I felt my temper rising, and I think that
they too noticed my suddenly clenched hands and my movement in my
white-wood chair. At least, the president of this curious assembly held
up his white hands and said, almost hurriedly, for him, “Please do not
attempt anything hasty, Mr. Frankland. I can explain everything.”

“Even those two thugs who kidnapped me?” I asked, with an attempt at
sarcasm which, I am afraid, failed miserably.

The man in grey smiled again. “They are hardly thugs,” he said. “We
would rather call them ‘necessary strong-arm assistants’!”

“You can call them what you like,” I began; but he cut me off with one
wave of his hand.

“We had to exert _some_ pressure, my young friend,” he said, “otherwise
I cannot imagine that you would have come here so quickly and
so—inevitably. It was a case when the end justified the means, as you,
a historian, will appreciate.”

I said, “You didn’t get me here to discuss Machiavelli, I am sure.”

The man in grey said softly, “No, but we asked you here because you will
appreciate the necessity of force, in the right place, being both an
intelligent reader of history and a boxer of some repute. Moreover, we
know from your activities as President of the University Conservative
Association that you are politically minded, and would wish to do the
best for your country.”

I stood up. “Gentlemen,” I said, “this is, frankly, fantastic. You have
me dragged off in a car and brought here, with masks on your faces, to
praise my politics. It makes no sort of sense that I know. I must go
now, I’m sorry, and you must find another little blue-eyed victim for
your gang games.”

I pushed my chair under the table, prepared to act if any of the three
tried to prevent my walking out. But no one moved. I think that unnerved
me for a moment.

Then the man in grey pushed something across the table towards me. It
was a green slip of paper, a cheque. It was made out to me, for three
thousand pounds. There was a scrawled signature at the bottom of the
slip, which I could not decipher at my distance away from it.

The man in grey said, “Don’t go so fast, my friend. This is a little
present for you, if only you’ll see sense and do a job for us.”

My head whirled at the silliness of the situation. I had never seen so
much money in my life before. It was beyond my most stupid dream. Yet
another part of my brain told me that this money would let me do what I
had always dreamed of doing, to fit out a digging expedition in
Macedonia, where I was sure I would find Celtic remains. I would get an
M.A. out of that, too!

But I put that fantasy behind me and said, almost wearily, I recollect,
“The answer is as before. I am a busy chap. I have work to do. Good
night.”

I turned from them and walked to the door. I recall the bright blue and
maroon pattern of the thick carpet on which I walked. Then I heard a
voice behind me say, “Stop, Mr. Frankland! If you open that door, I
shall shoot!”

I glanced back. The man in the grey suit was pointing a little automatic
at my back. His white hand was very steady. His face was set beneath his
mask. The faces of the other two men were also set, still as stone masks
themselves.

I had no more to say. I shrugged my shoulders. The door-knob was in my
hand. It was very cold, I noticed. I turned it, wondering when that
thing would go off, when I would feel whatever it is one does feel when
a bullet strikes into one’s back.

But nothing happened. With the door half-open, I turned again in
amazement. The man in grey was sitting smiling, and so were the others.
He had laid down the pistol and his fingers were touching each other in
the attitude of prayer once more.

“Come back, Mr. Frankland,” he said. “You are a brave man. You are the
man we want, but did not hope to find. I do implore you, sir, come
back.”

His voice was so gentle, so quietly authoritative, what could I do? I, a
scholar of a University, trained to set such a high store on culture and
civility? And perhaps I was curious, too.

And perhaps that cheque for three thousand pounds helped—since it was
being offered so genteelly now, with such a show of grace.

I turned back into that room, sat down again and said, “Gentlemen,
please take off your masks.”

And no one was more surprised than I when they did so, gravely, almost
sedately, as though wearing masks was an everyday routine with them.


                                 _Four_
                              A Tale Told

The man in grey spoke first. His words came fast and I listened
intently, my eyes still on that cheque.

“My young friend,” he said, “I must first introduce myself. I am Doctor
Phipps, of the Nuclear Science Department at Warnmere. I am a research
scientist—and I knew that you and I would speak a similar language, for
you too are a research man, in your own line.” He smiled a little as he
said this, almost as though my form of research was inferior to his own,
but I let that pass.

He went on, “I have known your Professor of History since childhood.
When I asked him the name of a trustworthy young man, he willingly
suggested you—though, in his defence, I must say that I did not tell
him exactly what we wanted you to do. Anyway, that being so, we
investigated your career so far, and that investigation only confirmed
your Professor’s opinion. Your boxing victory to-night clinched it all.
Had you lost that little fight”—he grinned as he used the word
“little”—“you would have lost this money also, I might say, for we need
a strong man, as well as an intelligent one.”

I said, “Doctor Phipps, the world is too much with me right now. Would
you order me a strong cup of coffee, please?”

He smiled and pressed a bell in the wall behind him. A waiter knocked
three times on the door before entering. I was impressed by the security
of the whole occasion. I was equally impressed by the fine quality of
the coffee. It brought a new spirit of cheerfulness into my outlook.

Meanwhile, Doctor Phipps waved his white hand about him. “This is a
nameless friend of mine from the French _Sûreté_; and this, an equally
anonymous friend from the European Bureau, American Zone. At present, I
dare say no more.”

I leaned back now and smiled. “So,” I said, “because I am a scholar, of
sorts, and a boxer of recent successes, you ask me to do something for
you, in return for which you give me three thousand pounds?”

They nodded, but the Frenchman immediately chipped in with, “_Mais,
Monsieur, vous comprenez que_ . . . oh, you understand that the money is
to be paid, _quand vous avez_, what is it, when you have done the
business, _compris_?”

“Yes,” I said, perhaps a little bitterly. “I understand that: no
business, no money. All right, go on, _mon ami_!”

The American chewed on his cigar and leaned back on the delicate legs of
his white-wood chair. For a moment I was afraid for that chair; he was a
very heavy man.

He laughed and said, “Boy, I take a fancy to you.” Then he seemed to
recollect himself and said, “Just so long as you are on the other side
of a table, and I have a little cannon like that to keep you in place!”

The man in grey clucked impatiently, as though he disapproved of these
transatlantic asides.

“Mr. Frankland,” he said, directly, in his precise and clipped voice, “I
must come to the point, I see, or we shall get nowhere to-night. I am
going to risk a great deal in speaking frankly, but I shall do so,
because I think I know what your reactions will be. They will be those
of a gentleman and a scholar; you will be discreet.”

He waited so long after that, that I began to feel embarrassed, but I
lasted it out and he went on.

“My Department has recently perfected a device which, we feel convinced,
will be of the utmost use to the civilization of the western world. I
must tell you a little of it, but you will appreciate that I may not go
into details, even if you could understand them—and I say in all
confidence that you as a historian will grasp my meaning.”

I bowed ironically to him. “I find it difficult to add up my change in
any shop where there is an efficient salesman,” I said.

He bowed in return and said, “I understand, Mr. Frankland. A common
situation among Arts students, if I may say so. The great chain stores
make their dividends out of such dear people as yourself, and they are
legion.”

The Frenchman rattled his wine glass. He was about to intervene when the
man in grey went on hurriedly, “You see, we have at last made a directed
missile which can project, as it rotates, a limited degree of radiation.
Enough, let us imagine, to make any area over which it passes, untenable
for a fortnight. It is not, as one might say, lethal; but it is _very
damaging_, in that it would hold up production for a set time, and cause
some confusion amongst the enemy civilian population.”

The American almost leered at me, over his cigar. I noticed his
wonderful gold tooth; his splendid coloured tie. I felt that this was a
type a young fellow might like.

He said, in his slow drawl, “We don’t kill ’em; we just stop ’em from
killin’ us, boy!”

“Precisely,” said Doctor Phipps, precisely.

I felt it my turn to speak. “Very well, where do I come in? I am no
scientist.”

Then, in a great rush of words, the Doctor told me; this device was
already in production, all over the country and also in France and
America. It was a matter of the utmost secrecy, of course.

But here the snag arose. There was a man, a John Hawke, by name, of a
good family, educated at Rugby and Oxford, an athlete and an explorer. A
man in his early thirties who lectured up and down the country on his
unusual experiences among the Masai and the Esquimaux, and so on.

I said, “And what is wrong with that, may I ask?”

The little Frenchman muttered, “Nothing, _mon ami_, as such. But we
happen to know that his sympathies are not our own. We know that he is
working for another way of thought. His mother, you see, _Monsieur_, was
not British. He takes his name from his late father, a respected man,
but his mother was a Central European. He loved his mother, _mon ami_;
but he is still British, and he is accepted in the circles of his late
and respected father here.”

The American scratched his head. He took the cigar from his mouth for a
moment. “We have this problem in the States, boy,” he said. “It’s
nothing to get worried about. You’ll come to know all about it, one day.
But right now, let me tell you that I’ve followed this Hawke guy half
over Europe in the last few months. He’s a smart guy, a contacts man.
And he’s got some terrible contacts, believe you me!”

Now I could contain myself no longer. “What has this to do with Doctor
Phipps’s protective device?” I asked bluntly.

And Doctor Phipps answered me. “Hawke is in England,” he said. “And he
is looking for our secret. He has the entrée to that type of house which
may have some knowledge of it. He lectures in the old houses, up and
down the country, about his silly adventures with the Tartars, and so
on, and having established confidence, may gain the secrets he wishes to
pass on, across the Channel.”

I felt that it was time to speak up. “Doctor Phipps,” I said, “it beats
me how a man can find out such things. It also beats me how a man could
pass on such things if he found them.”

It was the Frenchman who spoke. He was precise and typical. “My young
friend,” he said, “we of the _Sûreté_ have known him long. He found and
passed on the British radar system to Jugoslavia. He passed on the
American firepower of Fortresses to Japan—at a time when such things
mattered. We know that this fellow’s potentialities are dangerous.”

“Yes,” said Doctor Phipps, “and now Hawke is touring England, seeking a
lead. A lead which he will pass on, it doesn’t matter where; but it
could mean death to thousands if we let him do it.”

The American strained his chair to the utmost. He chewed his cigar and
slapped his ham-like hand upon his great thigh.

“Millions, Bud,” he said laconically. “Millions. We’d have no deterrent
to anything _they_ wanted to do.”

I said, “All right. What do you want me to do?”

In his prim grey voice, Doctor Phipps said, “Drag him down, my dear
fellow. Drag him down before he passes the secret on.”

The Frenchman’s voice pierced me to the bone.

“_Attendez un peu_,” he said. “He is a tough proposition, as my friend
over there might say.”

And our friend over there, the American, said, “He is such a man as I
would not wish to meet alone, boy. He makes the James Brothers look like
small fry and Al Capone like a kindergarten nurse.”

I said again to Doctor Phipps, “What do you want me to do exactly?”

He sensed my desperation, being British.

“I am a scientist, my boy,” he said. “I am not a man of violence, you
realize. But I would say, in my heart of hearts, put an end to him, if
you legally can. It is a great moral problem, you know.”

I was still awake enough to understand that.

“So,” I said, “you unload your moral problems on me, a patriot, a
scholar and a boxer? Why don’t you get the police to arrest this
dangerous character? Why pick on me?”

The little Frenchman smiled then. “Because,” he said, with an admirable
logic which I had to admire, “he hasn’t _committed_ the crime yet. Your
police cannot act until that happens. Besides, though, _naturellement_,
I respect the intelligence of the English policeman, I respect more a
young man of learning who can box in the manner of Georges
Carpentier—and who will walk to the door with a pistol directed at his
back.”

At last I said, “All right. I will do what I can.”

Doctor Phipps said, smiling greyly, “Then this cheque will be paid into
your account the moment he is finished, one way or the other.”

I met his gaze. He knew what I was thinking—that the English are hard
customers to deal with, whatever they say about themselves.

“We know your Bank,” he said. “And, if you are worried, we also know
your address. Your landlady, Mrs. Maguire, will not wait up for you. She
knows that you are going walking in Scotland for the next three weeks.
Your family in Shrewsbury have received a wire to the same effect.”

I looked at Doctor Phipps then, in his prim grey suit, and didn’t know
whether to call him my enemy or my friend.

I think he was both, as things turned out!


                                 _Five_
                               In the Net

I was given a room at the Green Man Country Club that night, but before
I was allowed to go up to bed, the big American took me aside and said,
“You’ll be going off early to-morrow, so I’d better put you in the
picture. This guy, Hawke, travels with two bodyguards, a Spaniard called
Pedro Moreno, and a Corsican who calls himself Jacko. They’re both
first-rate knifemen. We’ve got nothing on Moreno, except illegal entry
to the country; but we _could_ have taken Jacko in without any trouble,
in every place he’s been in, for assault, robbery with violence, and
even murder. He’s the boy to watch, my friend, this Giacomo.”

I began to feel a little uncertain of my ability to deal with the
situation, and told him so. He smiled and slapped me hard on the back.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “you’ll take ’em by surprise, and that is worth
two extra guns any time.”

I looked at him in bewilderment. He leaned over to me and said, “Hawke
is getting a bit breezy. He feels he wants another bodyguard, an
Englishman this time.”

“And I’m to be that bodyguard?” I asked.

“Hold on,” answered the American, “it’s not that simple, buddy. I can
see I’ll have to explain a bit more of his set-up. Well, Hawke has an
agent in London, Poplar way of all unlikely places. This man is by day a
fruit merchant and well-known, if not exactly respected, in the
district. A fruit merchant by day—an intermediary for any sort of shady
traffic by night. He can supply anything from a faked passport to a
paste replica set of the Crown Jewels—and no questions asked, provided
the price is good enough. Now this man may or may not be a foreign
agent, we are not sure yet—we’re keeping tabs on him. But we do know he
is no lover of Britain, or any other country for that matter. He’d sell
his grandmother for cat’s meat and think nothing of it.”

“And this man is to provide Hawke with a new bodyguard?” I asked.

The American nodded. “He has already done so,” he said, “nasty little
fellow with a taste for spring-knives, Rat O’Connell is his name. We
picked him up at Finchley Road station on his way north this morning to
join Hawke in Stratford-on-Avon. Took him in on a charge of petty
larceny.”

I gazed at him in despair, “But what do I . . ?” I said.

He smiled back at me. “You take his place,” he said. “You tell Hawke you
were an old friend of Rat’s. You were on the train with him when the
cops, rozzers, I should say, took him. Rat asked you to stand in for
him. That’s your story and you must stick to it—or else!” “Or else,” I
echoed as I trod the thick carpet to bed.

But I hadn’t finished with my new friends yet. I was hardly in bed
before there came a discreet knock at the door, and Doctor Phipps walked
in, carefully locking the door behind him. He looked a trifle
embarrassed, I thought, as he stood by my bedside.

“Pray forgive this intrusion, Mr. Frankland,” he said, “but there is
something I wish to make clear to you, to emphasize now.”

I nodded to him, I was too tired to do any more. He smiled and went on,
“You understand, we are all doing something quite illegal in this scheme
of ours.”

I still did not see what he was getting at. “Go on,” I said, “tell me
the worst.”

He shrugged his shoulders and said quietly, “You see, this plan, of
which you have agreed to become a part, is a purely private undertaking
and has no backing by law in the slightest degree.”

“But,” I said, “what about the American Bureau man and the French
_Sûreté_—they are _official_ policemen, aren’t they?”

He answered, “Yes, I am afraid so—but not _British_ policemen. Our
police have refused to take action—indeed, the British constitution
would not allow them to do so. But both America and France take a
different, more realistic, view. The persuasion of their police, and my
own enthusiasm as the inventor of this mechanism, have caused me to take
the law into my own hands, you understand?”

I nodded, vaguely. “Then who provides that cheque for three thousand
pounds if I remove the danger to your invention? Do you?”

He smiled greyly and shook his head. “No, my boy,” he said. “That money
comes from a Research Fund, of which I have the administration. It will
go down as ‘Incidental expenses’. It will be quite in order, I assure
you.”

I turned over in bed. I was feeling very tired now. “I see,” I said. “I
become part of the Research overhead expenses. That makes me feel
comfortably anonymous.”

He placed his hand on my shoulder, “For Heaven’s sake, my boy,” he said,
“never feel that. You are as much an individual as any crusader, any
upholder of a faith. You are working for Britain, for the safety of your
country and its people. Always remember that, whatever your momentary
scruples at what you might have to do.”

Then coldly I said, “What if I am put into such a position that I must
kill John Hawke, in order to keep your secret safe? What happens then?”

He sat down at the side of my bed and passed his white hand over his
face.

“Then,” he said with an effort, “we must hope that the British
Government will see sense, will see the patriotic intention behind the
act.”

I pressed home my attack. “And if they do not, what then?”

He got up and walked towards the window, looking out into the darkness.
“Then,” he said, “we shall all be in this together. All the financial
resources available to us will be diverted to your defence. It will be a
trial that will go down in history. I can say no more.”

He turned back abruptly. “Are you still our man?” he said.

“Why not?” I replied. “Perhaps the worst will not come to the worst.
Perhaps I may have luck enough to get rid of this traitor Hawke without
going to the last extreme.”

“Perhaps,” said the Doctor, at the door. “Perhaps, but, my dear young
friend, I doubt it.”

He smiled once, in his austere way, and then, without another word, he
passed through the doorway and I heard his footsteps sounding along the
corridor. I was not to see him again for a long while.

When I was sure that he had gone, I got out of bed and quickly scribbled
a letter to my people in Shrewsbury. I felt that I owed them a few words
of explanation. I tried to be discreet, merely telling them that I was
well but would be very busy for some weeks perhaps and would not be able
to write to them or visit them. I said that I might have exciting news
to tell them when we next met, though.

Then I got back into bed and slept—not like a mere log, but like a
whole Canadian lumber-camp of logs! I was still deep in sleep when I
heard a car start up outside the clubhouse. I looked at my watch. It was
seven-thirty.

I remembered that letter I had written and got out of bed. My window
gave on to the front of the clubhouse, on to the drive that led to the
dance hall. I saw a red pillarbox not twenty yards along the road. If I
didn’t post that letter now, it might never be posted.

I dressed immediately and went quietly from my room. Downstairs I heard
noises in what I took to be the kitchen, and the sound of a vacuum
cleaner whirring in the hall room. But I saw no one.

I went out into the road and was not more than five yards away from the
postbox, that letter already in my hand, when a voice called out behind
me, “Hold it, china! That’s no way to behave.”

Involuntarily, I turned to see the little razor-man of the night before,
getting out of a car in the park before the club.

He had been waiting there, it seemed, and moved with a remarkable speed.
He was by my side even before I had decided that I might beat him to the
postbox, and my letter was in his hand.

“Ho! Ho!” he said, derisively, “so you want to write to Mum already,
eh?”

I snatched out for that letter, but it was already in his pocket, and he
was two yards away from me.

“Nah, nah,” he said, “take it easy, son. You’ll get nowhere by violence,
you know.”

I said, “I’m rapidly coming to believe that, comrade.”

He grinned and said, “Now you go right into breakfast, it’s waitin’ for
you. And I’ll post this in a special little box I just happen to know
of.”

I looked at him with new eyes. He was a friend after all, it seemed.
“Will you really?” I asked.

“Yus,” he said, and very gravely tore the letter into small pieces and
flung it into a waste-paper basket at the entrance to the drive.

“C’mon,” he said grimly, “we’ve got work to do.”

I followed him into the club again, my appetite gone. I knew that I was
caught then; and what is more, I knew that, righteous as their plan was,
these men would not let me get away so easily.

There was a note by my plate, from Doctor Phipps. It merely said, “Trust
Joey. He knows the ropes. Good luck! Phipps.”

I looked across the table at the little man and said, “Are you Joey?”

He nodded. “Yus,” he said, “and also _Keen Boy_—a reference to my
favourite instrument—and _Midget_, and even _Man Mountain_.”

“Good Lord!” I said, “this is the end!”

He took another piece of toast. “No, china,” he said. “It ain’t even the
beginning—yet! You’ll see, my fine feathered friend!”


                                 _Six_
                            Strange Meeting

I was in that green Morris again, heading towards Stratford-on-Avon,
with the same two companions as I had had the previous night. But this
time I sat in the back, with Joey, who was “giving me the griff”, as he
put it—or “putting me wise”, as the big American would perhaps have
said.

“Nah, don’t forget,” his nasal voice went on, as the green countryside
sped past us, “your new name is _Billy Flash_. That’ll account for your
silk shirt and that nice way of talking you have, see? Moreover, you
come from Shoreditch and have served two stretches for assault and
battery. Got that?”

I nodded, already a little disgusted. I did not know that honest
citizens ever did this sort of thing, out of patriotism—though slyly I
told myself that they would doubtless do it for that green cheque I had
seen the night before.

“Right,” said Joey. “Now repeat it back to me.”

I did so, feeling rather embarrassed.

“Good,” he said. “Now latch on to this, china. I shall put you in touch
with this fellow Hawke and then it’ll be up to you to convince him
you’re _with him_, see? If he gets windy, he may do something
rapid-like, and quite unpleasant. He’s a hard chap to please, they do
say.”

I said, “All right, but how do I convince a man like that?”

Joey gave a chuckle which the big driver echoed. It seemed that they
were sharing a joke.

Then he said, “Simple. The old gag—you save his life, see?”

I said, with irony, “I see. I dive into the Avon and save him from
drowning, or I throw him a rope when he is hanging on to the roof of the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, rock-climbing?”

Joey gave a snort and turned away in disgust. Then he said, quite
sternly for him, “Nah look here, this is serious. Lives may depend on
it.”

I nodded, as gravely as I could and he went on, still angry. “You save
him from getting shot, see?”

“No, I don’t see,” I said.

“Well, you will,” he replied, pulling a sawn-off rifle from under the
car seat. “See this? No good for anything over ten yards, now, but
pretty slick at that range. I shall sling a slug out of this at him. You
will knock him aside and save his life, see? Simple.”

“And when does this happen?” I said.

“If possible, the second night you know him,” said the driver. “We shall
stay in Stratford and keep tabs on you. I shall be driving round. And on
the second night, I’ll find you, never fear. So keep an eye open, my
friend. Joey will lean out as we pass your lot and let Hawke have one in
the shoulder, unless you push him away. It’s got to look real. Do you
know what this car looks like?”

“Do I not!” I said. “I could never forget it.”

“Right,” said Joey. “Now don’t be so thick-headed next time I try to
explain anything. Otherwise I’ll report back to the Old Man that he’s
picked a wrong ’un.”

I said, with a wry smile, “I almost wish you would, Joey. I think I was
cut out for quieter things, you know.”

He slapped me hard on the back and smiled back. “Don’t talk so
dreamy-like,” he said. “Why, if I could fight like you, I’d be having a
crack at the real big money. Heavy-weight Champion of Aston Cross, I’d
be—nothing less! Ten quid or nothing!”

So, laughing perhaps a little shakily, I came into Stratford-on-Avon.

They put me out of the car on the bridge. “Turn yourself loose, now,
china,” said Joey. “Make yourself familiar with the place—you might
find that necessary. Don’t try anything till to-night, when you will go
to the Back Bar of the Hawk and Handsaw at eight-thirty and ask for Mr.
Hawke. Tell him you’ve come off the six o’clock London train. You call
yourself _Billy Flash_, remember? You needn’t talk any different from
what you do, see? And you are an old friend of Rat O’Connell, who was
snaffled yesterday. Say you were lying low, to see if the rozzers were
after you too, before you came up here. Got that?”

I nodded, “Yes,” I said weakly, “I’ve got that.”

“Right,” said the driver, “and to-morrow night, somewhere in Stratford,
I shall find you and _a certain incident_ will take place. Got that?”

I bowed slightly. “And at what time does that happen?” I asked
sarcastically.

The driver looked right into my eyes as he said, “Some time between six
and ten. We can’t be more definite, I’m afraid, your lordship. Now get
going and earn your money, boy!”

When I looked round again, that fateful little green Morris had merged
with the other traffic and was no longer visible. I suddenly felt very,
very lonely.

“Billy Flash! Billy Flash! Rat O’Connell! Rat O’Connell!” I said to
myself, as I walked up and down the gardens.

“Assault and battery! Shoreditch! Assault and battery! Shoreditch!” I
whispered, as I gazed at the white swans, bobbing on the quiet blue
river.

It was the loneliest day of my life.

“The rozzers snaffled Rat at Finchley Road,” I convinced myself, as I
lay on the green sward, staring at the great Shakespeare Theatre, over
the river. “The dirty rozzers nabbed him, just like I said, guvnor.
Rat’s an old china o’ mine, guvnor. We been on bags o’ jobs together,
sir. Like brothers, we was.”

I was getting along wonderfully with my piece when I recalled that I was
not required to do any character acting—just be myself. Billy Flash!
Billy Flash! Me, a graduate of a University, a son of respectable
parents, a pillar of Conservatism!

I could not help myself—I broke out into laughter, there on the towpath
of the sweet River Avon.

It came to me with a start then that I was not alone. A young girl with
flaxen plaits and a blue tunic was staring at me with great concern. I
have a young sister of my own and I have grown up to believe that girls
of that age, or any other, should not be encouraged. I tried to stare
back through her, over the river, towards the immortal red brick edifice
that looks like a biscuit factory but is a poetry assembly room. It was
no good. She came towards me and bent over me.

“You are not very well, sir,” she said—as though I was ninety at least.
“You have been lying in the sun and have a touch of sunstroke. First, I
must loosen your collar, then . . .”

I rolled away from her. “Hey,” I said, “what goes on?”

She smiled coolly and answered, “Girl Guide, on camping holiday here.
Must do my good deed, sir. Keep still and I will loosen your collar.”

“Go away,” I said, “I’m quite all right, thank you.”

She clucked efficiently. “They all think that,” she said, “but _we_
know. We are trained to give First Aid, sir. Please keep still, I can’t
help you if you don’t.”

She made another dive for me, her professional training at stake. I
dodged away, rolling on the grass. I noticed that people were looking at
us, some smiling, some disapproving.

At last I could stand this no longer. I reached up and took the young
girl by the wrist. “Now, be a good child and feed the swans, or
something,” I said. “Go and polish the tombstones in Shakespeare’s
church, if you want to do a good deed. Be off with you!”

I gave her a push, meant to be good-humoured, which turned out a little
harder than my intention. She fell over, half-laughing, half-crying, in
a bundle of arms and legs and plaits.

A burly young man wearing a coloured silk shirt outside his trousers
stopped and glowered at me. “Hey,” he said, “that’s no way to go arahnd,
knocking kids abaht, mister. Pick one yer own size, me for example.”

I said, “I wouldn’t pick you if you were the last one left in the shop,
chum. Go on now, beat it and mind your own business.”

I had tried to speak in a jocular, yet firm tone. But the young man
wouldn’t take a hint. He slung his camera off his shoulder and put it
down on the grass. He clenched his fist and put on what he must have
intended to be a threatening face. Then he came forward.

“Right!” he said. “Right! You’re just abaht my drop, mate!”

Frankly, I didn’t know what to do then. I might have used my right on
him—just where a brown bit of his midriff showed between the buttons of
his Hawaiian shirt; but that would have hurt him, and perhaps have got
me into trouble. I might have swallowed my pride and have begged his
pardon—but that was unthinkable in the circumstances.

However, I was saved the trouble of a decision for my new friend, the
Girl Guide, took a hand. She snatched up the young man’s camera and
swung it round her head in high glee, shouting, “Hiya, look what I’m
doing! I’m going to throw this right into the middle! Bet me I don’t!”

The young tough turned round in dismay, his eyes starting.

“Hey,” he gasped, “that cost four pahuds ten, you idiot!”

He ran at the girl, who led him a lively little dance for twenty yards,
then dropped his camera into a convenient clump of nettles. As he groped
among the green leaves, muttering, she lolloped back to me laughing.
“That fixed him!” she said. “Aren’t you glad?”

I watched the young man retreating, tapping his forehead to indicate
that we were both mad, the girl and I. Then I said, “Thank you for
nothing, miss. Now go about your business and leave me to mine.”

Her eyes were suddenly moist. “Just when I was getting to like you,” she
said. “I’ll never trust men again.”

“It’s a good thing to learn some ideas young,” I said callously,
recalling the attitude I would have adopted to my young sister if she
had spoken in this way.

The Girl Guide clenched her teeth at me. “Oh, you are heartless,” she
said. Then she sat down on the grass and twisted her rather grubby
handkerchief in her fingers. “Nobody likes me,” she whimpered. “Last
night I got into trouble for borrowing Sheila’s fountain-pen to write
home. I got put on camp duty all day while the others went on a bus
tour—and now _you_ turn against me.”

I thought she was really going to cry then.

“There’s no harm in borrowing a pen, surely,” I said.

She gazed up at me, her blue eyes very damp, and said, “No, but that
silly clot Sheila thought I’d stolen it and started an awful
hullaballoo! I’ll strangle her to-night, I declare, I will!”

I took the girl’s hand and raised her up. I hate getting involved in
other people’s emotional troubles, but I felt really sorry for this
well-meaning young scallywag.

“Look,” I said, “if you’ll go right back to camp afterwards, I’ll take
you into town now and buy you a fountain-pen of your own.”

She began to grin immediately, looking up at me. “Will you, honest?” she
said. “Oh, you are a dear! Better even than Rock Hudson, I do declare!”

And before I could dodge her, she had flung her arms round my neck and
was doing her damp best to kiss me. I put on a stern expression—which
didn’t seem to do much good. “I shall take it all back,” I said, “if you
don’t stop being so forward, young woman.”

But she was already trotting along the towpath. “Come on, handsome,” she
called back. “I know just the shop!”

So she got her pen—and a bottle of green ink to fill it from—and a big
writing pad to use them both on. “Oooh!” she said. “Whatever shall I
write on this lovely mauve paper?”

I was feeling just a little overpowered by then. “Oh, go back to camp
and write your Memoirs,” I said abruptly. “No doubt a forceful character
like you has got lots of affairs to write about! Good-bye.”

She stood on the pavement, clutching her loot. “Not even a farewell
ice-cream together?” she said wistfully. “Look, I have just enough for
two raspberry wafers.” She fumbled in her pocket and drew out a handful
of copper coins. I gave in once more. As we sat on the high stools in an
Ice-Cream Parlour, she dangled her legs and said, “I can tell you are a
fool where women are concerned! Now, aren’t you?”

I said, “Wipe that lump of vanilla ice off your nose, and we’ll go—our
separate ways.”

She stared down into her Peach Melba. “I _had_ hoped we might be
together till the bus comes back to camp. Then I wouldn’t be lonely, you
see. It will be back just before nine, Miss Thompson said. I have to
have a warm drink ready for the Troop.”

“Nine o’clock!” I said, with a gasp. “Why, I have a most pressing date
long before that.”

And as I said it, a strange shudder passed over me. Here was this child
trying to keep me from my assignment with—what? I suddenly wondered
whether she had been sent by some laughing Fate, to keep me from death
. . . a grubby angel in disguise.

But I brushed that idea away; the disguise was too good, I thought,
glancing at her grubby finger-nails and the holes in the knees of her
black stockings. No, definitely not an angel! A minor imp, perhaps.

“I’ll really have to go,” I said. “It is nearly six.”

She sighed, with all the resignation of womankind the world over, when
confronted by man’s stupidity.

“Well, at least tell me your name,” she said. “Mine’s Angela.”

Angela, the angel!

And for a moment I almost did. Then I drew back just in time. I leaned
over her and said, “Billy Flash. But keep it dark. I am not the sort of
person who courts publicity, can’t afford to.”

She gazed at me. “I know what you are,” she said suddenly. “You are a
gentleman gangster!”

Wryly, I nodded. She gave a little squeal of pleasure. “Oooh,” she said.
“Fancy that—and me, a Girl Guide!”

I put my finger over my lips. “Mum’s the word,” I said. “Remember that
pen. You are an accessory after the fact now, you know.”

She clutched it tightly to her and nodded. “I won’t breathe a word to a
soul,” she said.

She walked off in the direction of Holy Trinity church, stopping many
times to wave back to me, and bumping into passers-by as she did so.
Once she dropped her writing pad and caused a minor diversion of traffic
as she picked it up. In a way, I was sorry to see her go—and indeed, I
should have been. She was the last decent, gentle person I was to meet
for some time.


                                _Seven_
                           Quarry Encountered

The church clock was striking half-past eight when I reached the Hawk
and Handsaw. It was a renovated Tudor inn, built on two sides of a
cobbled courtyard, complete with heavily tarred black beams and an inn
sign that showed a gaily painted falcon swooping on to an equally
bizarre heron. I passed beneath the archway and made my way to a black
and white door on which the words “Back Bar” were outlined in tarnished
gold.

With my hand on the door-knob, I paused, wondering what I should find
inside that room. I tried to tell myself that I was not scared—but I
felt that my heart was thumping double-time, in spite of that
self-assurance!

In cases like this, I have always held that the best course is to keep
moving, to take action without too much thought about the consequences.
I have known even the bravest soldiers go to pieces if they have been
forced by circumstances to wait, to think, before a dangerous mission.
The thing to do, when you have made up your mind about a plan of action,
is to put it into operation _without delay_.

I told myself that as I turned the knob of that black and white door,
and entered the Back Bar of the Hawk and Handsaw.

I found myself in a small, square room, with a low ceiling crossed by a
heavy oak beam. The lights in the wooden chandelier were rose-red and
warm; the walls were panelled in a limed oak; the window was curtained
with a heavily woven mock-tapestry, portraying a medieval hunting scene.
There was a small bar counter in one corner, where, against a background
of many variously-shaped and coloured bottles, a young woman with yellow
hair stood smiling as she polished a wine glass. There was only one
other person in that room, a broad-shouldered hunched figure in a soiled
leather motoring coat. He wore a black beret, pulled well down over his
brows. There was a half-empty glass of some golden liquid on the table
before him, but he seemed to be sleeping, for his eyes were shut.

The girl said, “Good evening, sir,” in a flat voice, which carried
little welcome in it, I thought.

I went over to the bar and smiled at her. She allowed herself a token
smile in return. “What can I get for you?” she said, without enthusiasm,
putting down the glass and looking at herself in the mirror as she
patted her bright hair.

I said, “A glass of cider, please. It’s been a thirsty day travelling.”

She poured out my drink without speaking.

“Very hot in London to-day,” I said.

“That will be ninepence,” she said, staring over my shoulder.

I got a definite impression that my presence in that little room was not
particularly desirable. When she returned to her glass-polishing, I
looked round at the man in the beret. He was bulky and swarthy. His hair
was black and oily; definitely a Mediterranean type, I thought. Could
this be Pedro Moreno—or could it be Jacko the Corsican Giacomo?

As I looked at him his eyes opened and met mine immediately. His
heavily-jowled face did not change its somnolent expression in the
slightest, but his dark beady eyes were bright with menace. He had
obviously not been sleeping—just sitting slumped there in the corner,
relaxed and wary, a watchdog on guard and keeping quiet until he was
needed to do his bit of biting.

I nodded towards him and smiled. “Good evening,” I said. He did not
smile. He did not speak. His brown eyes stayed fixed on mine, in an
unblinking stare. I shrugged my shoulders and turned back to the little
bar.

The barmaid was watching me coldly too, though I found her gaze less
positively menacing.

Then, as casually as I could make it, I said to her, “Is Mr. Hawke
anywhere about, miss?”

She did not answer me, but I saw her eyes flicker behind me, towards
that corner where the man in the black beret sat. And then I felt a big
hand grasping my upper arm in a very strong grip.

I turned and said jocularly, “Hello, there! What’s troubling you,
mister?”

The man in the black beret must have moved from that corner table like
lightning, I thought. As he stood near to me I caught a strong whiff of
garlic—and then there was no doubting his continental origins.

He said thickly, “You ask for Mistair Hawke. Why should that be, hey?
Tell me why?”

Very deliberately I disengaged his thick fingers from my arm with my
left hand. I felt their brutish power as I did so, and knew then that
this man would be more than a merely tough opponent, if it came to a
rough-and-tumble.

“That’s better,” I said, when my arm was free again. “Now we can talk.
Why, you’ve got a grip like a policeman, chum!”

As I said that he spat and a grim line showed where his mouth had been.

“What is this of police?” he said. “What you want, hey?”

I tried to sound as rakish as I could, putting on a jocularity that I
didn’t feel.

“Oh, the old coppers know how to handle a bloke,” I said. “I ought to
know, they’ve had the old lock on me enough times.”

Once more, the big man said, “What you want with Mistair Hawke, hey?” He
came closer, his dark eyes staring into mine.

I said, “Look, chum, you can’t frighten me, see? I’ve got business with
Mr. Hawke himself, and I’m not telling you what it is. It’s private
business, see? You can’t be too careful about things like that, can you,
Miss?”

I pretended to appeal to the barmaid, who suddenly turned away and went
through a little door beside the bottles, ignoring me completely and
leaving me alone with the swarthy-faced watchdog. Suddenly, I sensed
that she was indicating to him that if he wished to get down to business
on me, she would not be there to bear witness on my behalf. Then I felt
very lonely indeed!

I had decided to play the game through, however, and I said once more,
“Look boy, I don’t deal with assistants. It’s the big man or nothing
with me, see?”

Before I had finished speaking, I felt myself being swung round by the
lapels of my jacket. I saw the man’s right hand go into his inner
breast-pocket.

Then the outside door opened and a young man and a girl came in,
chatting happily, their faces red with that day’s sun.

“What’ll you have, Mavis?” asked the young fellow.

“I’d love a lemonade in a long glass, with lots and lots of ice in it,
Phil,” the girl said. “Gosh, I’m thirsty!”

The big man’s hand had come away from my lapels and I was free again.
But I could feel the dampness of perspiration on my forehead and my
right leg was trembling uncontrolledly, as it always does when I am in
danger.

Then the big man suddenly linked his arm through mine, as though we were
close friends, and almost dragged me through the little door by which
the barmaid had gone.

As we went, I heard the girl say, “Oh, Phil, look at the funny way these
foreigners go on! Quite comic, ain’t it!”

The young man sniffed and said, “They look as if they’ve had a drop too
much, if you ask me!”

Then we were in a narrow passage-way. The big man said, “Right, mistair,
you ask for the Boss—you shall see him. Then maybe you wish you didn’t,
see?”

“Lead on, chum,” I said, trying to smile. “That’s all I’ve been asking.”

We went up two flights of stairs, and stopped before a white door. I saw
no point in hanging back, and was about to push open the door when the
man in the black beret caught my arm.

“Mind your manners, you,” he said, glaring at me once again, with
something of the effect of a film close-up. I grinned back at him.

He snorted and tapped quietly on the door three times. Within that room
someone was playing a guitar, though _playing_ is perhaps the wrong word
to describe what I heard. It was as though someone was thinking his
thoughts on to the strings—vibrantly sad thoughts, that sometimes rose
and soared in a wild melancholy that almost verged on violence. I had
heard something like this before and knew it to be Spanish gipsy music.
Then the sounds stopped suddenly and a voice called, “All right, Jacko,
come in. What are you waiting for?”

It was a balanced and cultured voice, with what I would have called “an
Oxford accent”. But I had no time to speculate on that matter, for Jacko
gave me a strong push in the middle of the back as he opened the
door—and then I was in the room.

By contrast with the harsh glare of the electric lights in that
passage-way, the room was almost restful, being lit only by two standard
lamps at opposite ends of the room. Beneath the dangling fringes of one
sprawled a man in a dinner jacket, his long fingers still lying across
the strings of a great black guitar. He was gazing up at me with a
faintly amused expression, as though half-expecting me, or someone like
me, and finding the whole occasion humorous in a gentle way. In the
light of that lamp, I saw his sleek black hair, which grew down his
cheeks almost to the jaw; I saw the long narrow face, the heavy eyelids
and the thin, ironical mouth. This was undoubtedly Pedro Moreno. He
smiled dryly and I caught a glimpse of a gold tooth.

Then my attention was called to the other side of that elegant room,
from which the same voice that had bidden us enter now spoke again.

“Well, Giacomo, what have you found, you scoundrel?”

At a delicate table, covered by a scatter of papers, sat another man.
His forehead was half-hidden by a green eyeshade and he was wearing a
crimson dressing-gown over a white dress shirt. I observed his lithe
frame, his immensely broad shoulders, his light golden hair and the set
of his jaw. I had not the slightest doubt that this was John Hawke, the
man I was hired to drag down, as Doctor Phipps had put it—_my man_.

Jacko pushed me towards him. “In the bar this man asks for you, Boss,”
he grunted. “So I bring him.”

The man at the table shot such a glance at Jacko as I would not wish to
have sent in my direction just then. His mouth twisted into a bitter
shape and his cultured voice took on an unpleasant rasp.

“So you bring up any Tom, Dick and Harry who asks for me, do you, you
moron?” said John Hawke. “How do you know this fellow ought to come up
here?”

Jacko said, “I frisked him, Boss, on the way up. He has no weapon, no
knife, nothing. If you don’t want him, we can. . . .”

The guitar began to whisper again behind me, a plaintive little melody,
as though Moreno had lost interest. A spasm of annoyance passed over the
pale face of John Hawke. “Stop that damned noise, Pedro!” he said. The
melody ended on a broken note and the room was silent once more.

Then John Hawke rose from the table and came towards me, flicking off
the eyeshade as he approached. I was amazed at his height. I am not a
small man, but he towered over me.

He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and stood a yard away from me,
blowing his smoke over my head and looking down at me through
half-closed eyes.

He stood like that perhaps thirty seconds, until I was almost afraid
that I might tremble, or make some sign which would give me away to his
keen gaze.

“Who are you?” he said quietly. “A policeman?”

I grinned widely and, speaking as naturally as I could, with perhaps the
slightest coarsening of accent, I said, “No, mister! Just the reverse,
as you might say. Why, Rat O’Connell would laugh his socks off to hear a
crack like that!”

John Hawke did not move a muscle. He blew a smoke ring and watched it
rise into the air. Then he said, almost in a whisper, “At this moment,
Rat O’Connell would find it hard to raise a grin even, my friend.”

I stared at him in genuine surprise. “So, you know?” I said.

He stubbed out the cigarette viciously into a heavy glass ashtray on the
table behind him. When he turned round he said, “Yes, why shouldn’t I
know?”

Then he smiled, like a blonde tiger, wondering whether to eat now or to
wait a few minutes longer.

“What do you know of Rat O’Connell?” he asked.

I made myself smile again and said, “Why, I was with him when the
rozzers picked him up at Finchley Road. Just as the train was coming
in.”

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “No, as the train was pulling
_out_. And O’Connell was alone, my friend. You are a liar.”

Behind me that guitar began to mutter once more, but this time John
Hawke made no move to stop it. At my right side, between myself and the
door, I could hear the thick and laboured breathing of that big man they
called Jacko. My chances of getting out of that room were remote, I
thought, should my courage fail me. There was only one thing to do,
brazen it out. I grinned and shrugged my shoulders.

“Right,” I said. “I’m a liar. I wasn’t with Rat, but I should have been.
He asked me to be—and I let him down. I didn’t mean to, but a fellow
barged into me just as I was getting up to him. Then the rozzers took
him and I hung back. There was no point in getting pinched as well. That
was the agreement we had—if _he_ couldn’t get up here, _I_ was to stand
in for him.”

John Hawke bored into my eyes with his own grey ones, then, almost as
though he half-believed me, he nodded. “I know nothing about you,” he
said. “Nor does the man who sent Rat to me. He knows nothing of a
stand-in.”

I looked down at my toe as it traced a pattern on the carpet. “I’m down
on my luck,” I said. “Got no money to pay agents yet. Rat was letting me
in on a job, he said, if it came off. I’ve done quite a bit of
strong-arm stuff for him from time to time.”

I came out of my act to see John Hawke’s hand, held out towards me—a
well-manicured hand, sensitive but broad in the palm. The hand of a man
of action, I thought.

“Rat O’Connell is a pretty tough proposition,” he said, smiling grimly.
“Any man who has looked after Rat would have to be quite something.”

His hand was still held out towards me. I knew what he meant and I took
it, bracing my muscles as I did so—and I needed to. His grip was that
of the proverbial vice. I grinned at him as his long fingers clenched
round mine. Then, getting the feel of his hand, I began to exert what
force I had, trying not to hurry. And soon he stopped hurting me and I
felt my own bone and muscle telling on him.

Once I paused, anxious not to go too far, but he was still smiling at
me, as though teasing, daring me to go on. I have seen that sort of look
before, in the ring, when everything looks fine—but you don’t go for
the kill because of that look in your opponent’s eyes, that “come
hither” look.

Instead, I made a small grimace, as though Hawke was starting to hurt
me, and relaxed my grip slightly. Taken by surprise, his own grip
slackened, whereupon I twisted my hand round in his and getting a better
position, turned on everything I had.

He did not say a word, but a small gasp escaped from his open mouth, and
I saw that his upper lip was moist with the sudden shock of my attack.

Then I felt Jacko’s huge fingers squeezing the nape of my neck. I had to
let Hawke’s hand go to prise off those brutal maulers.

John Hawke was rubbing his hand quietly and staring at me, his eyes
grim, but his lips making the pretence of a smile. The muffled guitar
was still playing, a laughing accompaniment to the little drama that had
been played out in that fine room.

“I shall need a secretary to do my writing for me, as well as a
strong-arm man, for the next few days,” said Hawke, lighting a new
cigarette. I noticed that he used his left hand for the purpose, and
that pleased me. At least I had convinced him that I was capable of
holding my own, of looking after Rat O’Connell, for instance—or John
Hawke.

Then Jacko said from behind me, “What shall I do with him, Boss? Take
him for a moonlight ride?”

John Hawke sat down once more, beneath that restrained pink light and
smiled across the walnut table towards us. He shook his head slowly and
said, “No, old friend. Perhaps you can do that later on, but not now.
There is just the chance that he is what he says—in which case he might
be useful to us all, you see. More useful than Rat, for example. At
least this one was smart enough, if we believe him, not to get picked
up; and if we find that he is not what he says—why, then, Jacko, we can
make appropriate arrangements then.”

I shuffled to my feet deliberately on that fine carpet, as though in
some embarrassment and said, “Honest, Mr. Hawke, I’m here to look after
you, nothing else, I swear.”

I felt a strange satisfaction as I spoke those words, for they were
true, _very true_—but not in the way they sounded, on the surface.

To my surprise, he stared back at me, his face deadly serious. Then he
nodded, “Curiously enough, my powerful friend, I think you are. I think
you might well be what you say—but I am not sure. And I _must_ be
sure.”

He called over my shoulder to Pedro Moreno. “Get him a room for
to-night, next to Jacko’s.” Then he turned to Jacko and said, “While
Pedro and I are out to-night, keep an eye on this one. See that he has
what he wants, but don’t let him go downstairs. Understand?”

Jacko grunted and then tapped me on the shoulder.

“Come on,” he said, “you might as well turn in, have an early night.
Your room is up on the next floor.”

I said, “Oh, what a nuisance. I wanted to see the picture that’s on at
the corner, Humphrey Bogart it is, my favourite.”

Jacko snorted. “Ugh! Gangster rubbish,” he said. In the light of the
pink lamp, John Hawke was smiling broadly, as though he enjoyed the joke
too.


                                _Eight_
                          Matador and Silencer

That evening seemed endless. Jacko brought up a tray of sandwiches and a
pot of coffee and then left me. The clock down the street chimed ten and
the streets below were a little quieter than they had been. Out of
curiosity, hardly anything more, I tried the door gently. It was not
locked.

Then a fantastic idea came to my mind; what if I were to go down to that
private sitting-room again and look at the papers on the table? Let us
suppose that they were documents of importance to international
security. Would I not be doing a service to my country if I were to
steal them, to grab them up in my hands and rush downstairs and out into
Stratford, to the first police station I found?

The suddenness of it all appealed to me. John Hawke would realize that
the game was up, and then he might do something foolish, like shooting
at me, or at a policeman—and the noose would close on his neck. It
would all be so simple—so much easier, and perhaps less dangerous than
this cat and mouse game, which as yet I had not got worked out.

I slipped quietly from the bed and switched out my light. Then gently,
very gently, I eased the door open—first an inch, then two inches, then
a foot. The passage-way was empty. I stepped out and trod very carefully
past the next white door; that was Jacko’s room.

At the end of the passage were the stairs that led down to the
sitting-room—a distance of fifteen yards, no more. I walked almost
noiselessly along that thick carpet, my heart already thumping.

I was about to step on to the top stair when Jacko came out of a
doorway, his hands in his pockets.

“The bathroom’s in there,” he said, jerking his head back.

“Thanks,” I said, and went in. I turned the taps on for a while.

He was waiting outside for me when I came out at last, but did not speak
as he led me back down the passage-way. I heard the lock click when once
more I was in my own room.

There was nothing more for it; I was caught. I went to the window and
looked out. It was a sheer drop down to the street, three storeys below,
with not even a drainpipe to shin down.

In the light of the lamps, people were moving about, most of them gaily,
dressed as for holiday. Under one street-lamp two young men, their light
raincoats slung over their shoulders like cloaks were talking excitedly,
gesturing, waving their arms, striking poses. Even at that distance, the
sound of their animated high voices came up to me. They had been to the
Theatre and were acting it all again, telling each other how it had been
played—and how it should have been played.

But somehow, in that moment, Shakespeare seemed very remote to me, very
artificial—even unimportant!

Then, shocked with that thought, I rolled into bed and resigned myself
to sleep. I had found my quarry—now if I was to earn my three thousand
pounds and gain a name as a public benefactor, I had only to keep an eye
on him, prevent him from stealing Doctor Phipps’ secret weapon—and then
find some watertight occasion for handing him over to justice.

Overwhelmed with the immensity of that task, I fell into a deep sleep
and did not wake until the breakfast gong rattled the walls about my
ears.

It was a bright summer morning. I rose from my bed and tried the door.
It was still locked. And that made me very annoyed. Did they intend to
treat me as a prisoner? I asked myself, and then felt most
ill-used—until I recalled why I was there in any case. Then my anger
left me, for, after all, they had every reason to protect themselves,
hadn’t they?

I laughed at my own earlier self-pity and sat on the edge of my bed,
whistling and waiting. I did not have to wait long. Soon there was a
knock on my door; I heard the lock click, and then Pedro Moreno came in.
He carried a tray of ham and eggs, toast, marmalade and coffee, which he
set down on my dressing-table, with an air of resignation.

He was about to go out through the door again when I said, “What’s the
big idea, mister? Do you want to send me stark ravers with loneliness?”

His long Spanish face relaxed into a tired smile. He bowed his fine head
slightly and said, “I will send Jacko up to you for company, when he has
had breakfast. That will be in another hour. He is fond of the pleasures
of the flesh.”

I smirked and said, “Don’t bother. I’d rather be alone after all.”

He came into the room again and approached my bed. So near, I could have
kicked his feet from under him, I thought; or could I? This man’s
imperturbable calm impressed me more than any show of violence would
have done. You know how to deal with violent types—but quiet ones . . .
never!

He looked down at me and said drily, “You will pardon me, señor, but I
think you are a fool to get caught up in a thing like this.”

I jumped at the chance. “What do you mean?” I asked eagerly; perhaps too
eagerly. He gave a tired shrug to those wide shoulders and smiled again,
as though he found my presence distasteful. Then he turned back to the
door. “The little matador should choose a little bull,” he said. “The
big bull is for the giant.”

I said, “And who’s talking of bulls?”

He paused then, his hand on the door-knob; and I flung myself forward in
an instinctive action, trying to break out past him into the corridor. I
don’t know what possessed me; perhaps I resented being locked up on a
fine summer morning, with the sun striking down over Stratford. Perhaps
I felt sick of the whole affair and wanted to go no further in it.
Perhaps I was just crazy. I don’t know, but I made that attempt—and I
swear that with almost anyone else standing guard, I would have got
through. But not this time!

As I came forward, in a rugger tackle, Pedro Moreno leaned over me and
struck downwards with the edge of his long hand, exactly on the nape of
my neck. I measured my length on the carpet, stunned and defeated.

All the same, I recall looking up at him and saying, with as much of a
smile as I could muster, “That would be a foul in the boxing ring, old
boy!”

And I recall equally well his cold reply. “It is the place we strike at
in the bull ring, though, amigo!”

Then I saw his shoes going away from me and the cream wood of the door
closing. When I came to again, the coffee was cold—but I drank it, all
the same. I needed nourishment. I could not face the cold eggs, however,
and the congealed fat of the ham almost made me retch as I looked at it.
I flung the table napkin over it and then sat down by my window to work
out a plan of escape.

Outside the street was vivid with colour; a coach-load of trippers from
Birmingham was in, blowing red-striped cardboard trumpets and scattering
potato crisps far and wide for the hovering pigeons.

A stout man with a massive gold watch-chain dragged a dark-brown bottle
from his pocket and stopped in the middle of the road to quench his
thirst. Seeing a friend on the opposite side he shouted out, “What price
Shakespeare now!” The other man laughed and called back, “If it wasn’t
for the likes of us, there’d be no Shakespeare!”

I puzzled over that strange remark for a long time—so long in fact that
I did not hear my door open to admit Jacko. He was still wearing his
beret, but not his long overcoat. He stood with his thick arms folded
and said, “Come with me. Boss wants you.”

I bowed in irony, but he cut me short. “Pack it in,” he said. “Come
quick when the Boss sends.”

He let me go first down the stairs, and even through that dainty door
that led into John Hawke’s sitting-room.

John Hawke was sitting by the window, his back towards us. The door had
opened without a sound, and the carpet was a thick one. Yet he had heard
us enter.

“Leave us, Jacko,” he said. “Go away and test the sparking-plugs, or
something.”

Jacko made a protesting step forward. “But Boss,” he said.

Hawke waved a white hand wearily. “You heard what I said, Jacko. Go
away. If he gets troublesome I shall deal with him myself. You can drive
the body out to Shottery to-night and leave it in Anne Hathaway’s
garden.”

Jacko went out, scratching his greasy head.

Then Hawke said, still without turning, “Do you mind shutting the door?
That clumsy lout will never remember.”

I did as I was told, wondering whether I should go on through that door
and out into the street. But I didn’t go out—perhaps because Jacko
might still be on guard somewhere; perhaps because I was anxious to come
face to face with this mystery man at last, and alone.

Yet now that I had my chance, I was silent. This man exerted a strange
hypnotic influence, I felt sure, on all who came into contact with him.
I did not know what to say; indeed, there was nothing to say. I waited
for him to speak, which he did at length, turning round slowly in his
chair and looking me straight in the eye.

“You are a fool,” he said. “I do not know what your game is, but you are
a fool. I have been on the phone all morning, trying to check up on
you—and no one knows you.”

He saw my protest forming and held up his hand. “Don’t try to brazen it
out,” he said, “I know all the channels. _No one_ knows you. Is that
clear?”

I swallowed and said, “I met Rat O’Connell by chance. I took to him and
he took to me. We decided to go round together without any agents,
without any gang interference, see?”

John Hawke stared through me. Then he slipped his hand into his jacket
pocket and slowly pulled out a snub-nosed pistol. With one long finger
he indicated a silver attachment to its muzzle. Then, leaning slightly
to the left, he pressed a switch in the wall. The radio lit up and the
strains of a dance band filled the room.

He smiled bitterly. “Victor Sylvester, my friend,” he said. “What an
accessory after the fact! He and this little silencer, eh?”

I could not resist raising my hand to wipe away the beads of
perspiration that I felt forming on my forehead.

“Talk fast,” said John Hawke. “I have not long to waste. Tell me about
yourself, dear friend, and tell me convincingly. For I swear to all the
dark gods of forest and river that I shall shoot you through the head if
you don’t come clean.”


                                 _Nine_
                                Reprieve

In my time I have made a parachute jump; I have met the Midland Area
Heavy-weight champion over six rounds; and I have attended at least four
_viva voces_ with eminent archaeologists! One might say I had had fair
experience of danger, in a quiet sort of way.

But I had never sweated as I did then, before that elegant Chippendale
table, on which lay a gold cigarette-lighter side by side with a
blue-steel automatic.

I said, “You are making a big mistake, Mr. Hawke.”

He smiled, his thin mouth rising more on one side than the other,
mirthlessly, bitterly. Then he slowly raised the automatic pistol until
it pointed at a spot above my eyes, and took aim, frowning a little as
he did so.

The music of Victor Sylvester’s dance orchestra suddenly grew in volume.
They seemed to be having a good time. I was not.

I suppose I might have blurted out the whole story then—or even have
flung myself on to the floor, hoping to escape the blast of that vicious
instrument. But I think I was too petrified to take either course.
Instead, I did something which made no sense at all—but something which
came to me instinctively.

In a loud and clear voice which surprised me, I suddenly said, “John
Hawke, if you are a man, put that thing down and come round that table.
And if I don’t break every bone in your body within five minutes—then
turn your blood-hounds, Moreno and Jacko on to me.”

For a moment I was amazed at what I had said. For another moment that
frown of concentration stayed on his face. Then his hand wavered
suddenly and the pistol was lowered slowly to the table top.

His face white and drawn, John Hawke said, “I have half a mind to take
you at your word, my friend. And if I did, you might regret speaking out
of turn.”

Then just as suddenly he walked over to me and stood about two feet away
from me, his hands by his side.

“Only a brave man would have reacted as you did then,” he said. “I
swear, I would have shot you like a dog—but I sensed courage in you,
and courage is a quality we should not destroy, wherever we find it, it
is so rare.”

I sneered openly at him then. “Thank you for nothing,” I said.

He glanced at me as though I had become a worm again. Then he said
icily, “You may be what you say you are, I do not know. You may have
been one of Rat’s _private_ friends. I shall take a chance with
you—just one. And if it goes wrong, then God help you, for I shall go
on where we have just left off. I shall shoot you down with as little
mercy as I would a wolf. Now go back to your room and wait until I send
for you.”

I gave him a mock salute and turned on my heel.

Pedro Moreno was waiting for me in the passage-way. He was just putting
a long knife back into the left lapel of his jacket—a very slim knife,
I noticed, hardly much thicker than a knitting needle, but so much more
wicked-looking.

His face gave no signs of his emotions. “Keep right on, up the stairs,”
he said, “señor.”

I did not reply.

At my door he said, “You are a lucky man, señor, I think. I know no one
else who would have taken the chance you did.”

I turned to him and said, “What do you take me for? I come here to help
him and he tries that stuff on me. Anyone would do the same, chum.”

The long Spanish face allowed itself the slightest show of sarcasm.
Then, without a change of inflection, he said, “Get into your room and
stay there. Those are your orders, my friend.”

The lock clicked behind me, and strangely enough, I was so relieved to
be back there in safety, I fell on to the unmade bed as though I had
never slept before.

I woke up in a flurry of anxiety, troubled in my mind, yet not knowing
what it was that troubled me so. Then in a flash I remembered—this was
the _second day_—the day when my friends—if I might call them
such—were going to shoot at Hawke and I was going to save him!

Sitting up in my bed, I scratched my head and wondered just how one was
supposed to achieve that impossibility from the height of three storeys!

“My, oh my! But you do like to do things the hard way!” I said to
myself, laughing in spite of my depression.

Then Jacko was standing beside me and glowering, as usual.

“Get up, you lazy lay-about,” he said. “The Boss wants to take you
somewhere.”

“For a ride?” I suggested, drily. “For a one-way journey, for example?”

He relented far enough to let one side of his thick mouth slip down a
little—his closest imitation of a smile—and said, “Maybe! Who knows?
Maybe!”

Then he put out his hairy hand to grasp me and I slid away from him, to
the other side of the bed.

“All right, I’m coming without your help,” I said. “And just a word of
friendly warning—keep your paws well away from me, my old gorilla, or
you and me are going to get really tangled up.”

A dark cloud seemed to cross his swarthy face for an instant and I
thought that this fiery tempered man was going to rush forward to attack
me there and then. But I stood my ground, my right hand ready. He seemed
to hesitate, and then he shrugged his bear-like shoulders and went to
the door.

“Come on,” he said. “Don’t keep _him_ waiting.”

“After you, dearest one,” I said smiling. “I’d rather walk _behind_ you,
if you don’t mind.”

He gave an ugly snort and set off down the passage-way. I followed him
then, a grin on my face, but with a flutter in my chest that only meant
one thing—that I was excited, in spite of myself.

In the little Back Bar where I had first met Jacko, John Hawke and Pedro
Moreno waited, their soft hats pulled down.

Hawke looked at me searchingly. Then he said, without any expression,
“Come along, my daring friend. We are going to take you out with us.”

I said, “Are you going to bring me back, that is more to the point!”

Pedro Moreno smiled, a slow Spanish smile, full of sardonic humour, of
quiet guile.

Hawke smiled too. “Perhaps,” he said. “We may even bring you back—if
you behave. We are taking you to the theatre with us, my friend. You
shall see Sir John playing Hamlet.”

I let my tongue run away with me then.

“Yes,” I said, “there might be a moral for us all there:

       ‘_So oft it chances in particular men . . ._
        _That, for some vicious mole of nature in them . . ._
        _Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect . . ._
        _Their virtues else, but they as pure as grace,_
        _Shall in the general censure take corruption_
        _From that particular fault. . . !_’”

Hawke said, “I shall forgive the condensation, my friend, for it helps
you to make your point. Yes, how truly he speaks, our friend the
Bard—that every man has his weaknesses, however strong he might be in
other respects. It will be a pleasure, of a sort, to sit with you
through this performance. I shall look forward to your
commentary—_Billy Flash_!”

He said no more, but led the way through the courtyard towards the
street. Strangely, time seemed to stand still for me. I was actually
looking forward to a visit to that Theatre! I felt that I had been a
prisoner for years, locked away from the world.

And it was only when we stood on the pavement, waiting for a gap in the
traffic that I realized what was going to happen.

I saw two things at the same time—both of them rather frightening.
Coming down the pavement on our side, not ten yards from us, was a troop
of young Girl Guides, led by Angela, the girl for whom I had bought the
fountain-pen only the day before. She saw me and ran forward with a
great whoop of joy.

And coming down the road, tucked snugly into the stream of traffic, was
the little green Morris that I knew so well—already edging over towards
the kerb edge so as not to miss. I saw that it carried red trade plates
and not its legal registration number—and my heart sank within me.

John Hawke was standing a little behind me and to my left. Angela must
have to pass before him to reach me, as she intended to do. And at the
speed it was travelling, the car would reach us at the same instant.

I forgot all about John Hawke as I realized this.

“Go back,” I yelled at the child, waving my arms at her.

She waved in reply and scampered on towards me.

Then she was a yard away and still running, and the green Morris was
alongside.

In that curiously sharp-edged way that one has in dreams, I saw the snub
nose of the sawn-off rifle suddenly poke over the window ledge of the
car, and I flung myself forward, in front of the girl and in front of
John Hawke.

I remember hearing a little _pop_, and then a scream. Then the traffic
was moving off into the distance and I was lying on the pavement, with
Angela holding my head and yelling out to her Guides.

“Don’t panic,” she was saying, “it’s a simple case of abrasion on the
temple—nothing serious—quite superficial. You, Sheila, tear a strip
off your pants, you idiot. It will stop the bleeding.”

I saw the wide-eyed cluster of young female faces above me. And behind
them I saw the tense face of Hawke and the long sardonic face of Pedro
Moreno. They looked like men suddenly caught on the wrong foot.

I had to smile at them, even as I felt myself slipping off into a faint.
After all, it had been quite a thump I took . . . harder than anything I
had ever met in the square ring!

When I woke again I was lying in my bed, back in that hotel bedroom that
I had got to know so well during the last two days.

I groaned and put my hand up to my head. Then I saw that John Hawke was
sitting on a chair at the bedside. He leaned forward and took my hand
for a moment. Then, as though regretting his action, he let go of it
again.

“Thanks a lot,” he said. “I have a feeling that what you did was not for
me—but thanks all the same.”

I grinned and said, “Don’t mention it—just send for me any time you are
about to be shot at. Only too pleased to stand in, I’m sure!”

There was a longish silence then, and at last he said, “I asked that
young girl-friend of yours what your name was. She seems to think it is
what you told me it was.”

I shut my eyes; the pain was coming back in little throbs.

“Is that surprising?” I said. “A name doesn’t change, does it?”

John Hawke passed his long white hand across his forehead. “Either you
are a very truthful man—or a very dangerous one, to me,” he said. “I
don’t know which.”

I shook my head as much as I dared. “I don’t feel very dangerous, my
friend,” I said. “Moreover, I’ve never heard it said that you’ve got to
take cracks on the skull to be classed as dangerous.”

John Hawke said, “Perhaps I was wrong there, Billy. Perhaps you are what
you say you are. Perhaps you are just an idealist, of some sort. I don’t
know. After what you’ve done for me to-night, I’ll just have to take a
chance on it. Good night.”

He was gone from the room before I could reply.

Pedro Moreno came in a little later with a tray of chicken and asparagus
and a half-bottle of Sauternes.

I looked at the bottle wryly. He said, “Mr. Hawke wanted to send
champagne, but I thought your head would not stand it right now.”

I said, “Would he feel too insulted if I asked for a bottle of grape
fruit instead? I feel very thirsty—not festive.”

Pedro put down the tray. “Just now,” he said, “I think you could ask for
a decanter of liquid gold—and get it.”

He went out then. The chicken was very good—almost worth that crease in
the head, I thought, as I sank off again into slumber.


                                 _Ten_
                           The Plot Thickens

I spent the next day in bed, having been visited by a spry young doctor,
who grinned as he said that my skull was fortunately thick enough to
take a knock like that, but who warned me about playing about with
rifles at the fairground in future.

When I expressed some surprise, he wagged his finger at me and said,
“Oh, I’ve heard all about it from Mr. Hawke. Fancy walking in front of a
chap who was just about to shoot—really, you asked for it, old boy!”

He left, after advising another day in bed on a light diet.

Giacomo did not come in to see me. Apparently, he kept watch downstairs
most of the time, in that little back bar. It soon struck me that Pedro
was the favoured one. He spent much time with John Hawke in the
sitting-room, talking and laughing, or playing on that guitar. I
wondered if the bull-necked, bull-brained Corsican resented this, and I
even began to work out a plan by which I induced Giacomo to rebel and so
to help me drag down John Hawke.

Then the respectable side of me set up a squawk; Yes, it said, but what
do you do with Giacomo after that? Don’t forget, he has a few charges of
murder hanging over him, against the time when the forces of Order catch
up with him.

I gave that plan up; I couldn’t let even Giacomo down, once he had
helped me.

I was still puzzling this out when the door opened and John Hawke
entered quietly and smiling. He sat down by my bedside and began without
any preamble.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve taken you on, more or less, Billy. Now I’ve got
to let you in on a few things, if you are to be of any use to me.”

Somehow, I was not prepared for this almost friendly approach. I like an
enemy to stay an enemy, a friend a friend; otherwise, it’s hard to work
up enough hate or enough liking to keep the old wheels going round.

I said, “Please don’t tell me anything you don’t feel I should know. I’m
just standing in for Rat O’Connell, as private bodyguard. I shall expect
a living-wage and all found. That’s enough for me.”

Hawke dug me in the ribs and grinned. “Come off it, Billy,” he said.
“I’ve taken a fancy to you. You’re a tough man, and an educated one; I
can talk to you in a way that I can’t always to—the others. You are
British, you see; we speak the same language.”

For a moment I almost let slip something about his other side, his Slav
side; but fortunately I held my tongue. He went on then.

“I’ll make no secret of it,” he said. “I’m on to something pretty big
and pretty important. If it comes off, I shall make a fortune—and so
will those who stick by me. But I’ve got to be ruthless, Billy—just
that. I’ve got to do things at times which might look bad to anyone who
didn’t see what I was driving at.”

I dared to say, “Such as what, Mr. Hawke?”

He got up and walked towards the window, his long chin in his hand,
thinking. Then he said suddenly, “I may have to take the law into my own
hands. I may have to do things which look like the acts of a saboteur, a
traitor, even. But whatever I do, I shall do it with the knowledge that
I am fulfilling my destiny, fulfilling the pattern laid down for me at
my birth; a pattern for which I am not responsible. That is my
satisfaction.”

He was standing at the foot of my bed, looking at me intently. I said,
“I do not follow you entirely, Mr. Hawke. What pattern are you speaking
of?”

He snapped his fingers lightly and smiled. “Let me put it this way,
Billy; you don’t expect a tiger to lap milk out of a saucer and to come
when he’s called, do you?”

I shook my head, smiling back at him.

He went on, “The tiger’s allegiances are with the jungle and not with
the keepers at the Zoo. He will tear them if they put themselves in a
position to be torn, will he not? And in a way, I am the same. You see,
my friend, in spite of my name, my appearance, my education, I am not
entirely British. My mother was a Central European, you see. Though my
distinguished father gave me his looks, she gave me her mind, her
outlook, her allegiances.”

I dared to ask, “Your mother, is she alive, Mr. Hawke?”

He turned away from me as he replied. “No,” he said bitterly. “She was
killed by a British bomb, my friend. She went back to visit her own
people just before the War started and was never able to return to
England again. The train she was in was destroyed in a British bombing
raid.”

I said, “I am sorry, Mr. Hawke.”

With a sudden violence, he picked up a poker that lay in the hearth and
slashed out at a vase of flowers standing on a table. It lay smashed on
the carpet, the flowers torn and bedraggled, the water splashed up the
wallpaper.

He flung the poker back into the hearth and said, “I was sorry too; but
I am beyond that now. Now, _there is only revenge_. That must be my
sorrow.”

Without another word he walked to the door. There was nothing for me to
say—nothing I could say. He went out, along the passage.

That afternoon, I got up, too bored to stay any longer in bed, despite
the doctor’s orders. I made my own way down to the sitting-room, and no
one tried to stop me.

Pedro Moreno was alone, in the centre of the big room, in his
shirt-sleeves, swinging his light gaberdine jacket before him and making
small gliding steps across the carpet. He hardly noticed my entrance.

I watched him for a while, swinging the coat this way and that,
whistling and swaying sideways, then leaning over forwards, as though he
saw something hunched before him and was trying to baffle it.

Suddenly he flung the coat away from him, on to a settee and turned
smiling, rolling down his white silk sleeves.

“No, amigo,” he said, “I am not loco, not mad, yet! I was once a
matador, in my silly days, and sometimes I like to see if I can still
use the cape. That is all. You like the bull-fight?”

I said that I was not competent to judge, since I had never seen
one—but that I disapproved of blood sports in general, unless the
creature hunted had the chance of defending itself.

Pedro laughed and slapped me on the back. “Have no fear, amigo,” he
said, “if you saw a black Miura bull, well, you would not pity him too
much! He can defend himself, my friend, and a bit more besides.”

He flicked open his white silk shirt and I saw the livid puckered scar
that ran across his brown chest. It had been a ghastly wound.

“You see,” he said. “And I was not a poor matador—no novice, I assure
you. That one put me in hospital for a year, but I didn’t begrudge him
that. I was able to put the little sword in before I passed out. They
dragged us both from the arena together, I think!”

He turned from me and poured himself a glass of sherry. He held the
glass up solemnly and said, “To the memory of the best bull out of
Andalucia!”

Then he said wryly, “But I’d rather face three black bulls than climb
into a boxing ring with a Midland Area heavy-weight champion, amigo.”

I looked at him in amazement. “Who told you that?” I asked.

He turned up his eyes humorously. “A little bird,” he said. “No, my
friend, don’t forget, after that bullet knocked you out, you had quite a
chance to talk in your sleep—which you did!”

I shuddered at the thought. What had I said!

“I suppose I told you about my Aunt Emily at Southport?” I said, in a
sudden sweat of apprehension.

He shook his head. “No,” he said, “but you made it pretty clear that you
knew what the inside of a ring was like. We also gathered that you were
interested in the Mediterranean area and had political associations.”

I breathed an inward sigh of relief. They assumed that my interest was
in their part of Europe, in their form of politics. They now looked on
me as a sympathizer, of value to their cause. Things could not be
better, I decided.

Pedro Moreno confirmed my view. He flung himself on to the settee, one
leg dangling over its arm.

“Amigo,” he said, “just be yourself. You are among friends. We are on to
a big job very soon. You will need all the courage you have got, but it
will work out well in the end.”

Things had happened a little too fast for me. I sat down in an armchair
and said, “What is to happen, Mr. Moreno?”

He gave me a sharp look and said, “Call me Pedro, amigo. We are to be
associates; then let us be as friendly as is necessary. It is a little
different with Jacko, you see; he is—as you might say—_crude_. A
brutal man, not an artist, you understand.”

I sensed once again the enmity between these two followers of John
Hawke—and I wondered which one I would support, if it came to a
show-down.

Then Pedro said, “To answer your other question—we are going to spy out
the land, as you say, to-morrow. A place near here, where John Hawke
will give one of his lectures—something about Esquimaux, or Orinoco
Indians, I forget which, he has been everywhere. But after the lecture,
there will be a reception, and we shall meet certain people who may be
useful to us. That is all.”

He looked down at the toe of his brightly polished shoe in silence. I
said, “What sort of thing are we interested in, Pedro?”

He did not speak for a moment; but then he said, with all the ice of the
Arctic in his voice, “That is something you must ask your employer,
amigo. I may not answer things like that—even if I knew.”

Suddenly I felt the iron walls of his loyalty to Hawke closing round me,
making me a prisoner once again. I might just as well be back in my
bedroom, or in the little back bar with Jacko, I thought.

I got up and said, “Thanks for the chat, Pedro. I’ll be seeing you
later.”

He bowed his dark head gravely. “_Hasta la vista_,” he said, “and do not
upset the Corsican, whatever you do. He is a good bulldog—although he
would love to get his teeth into me!”


                                _Eleven_
                             Beltenham Hall

I did not see John Hawke again until early the following evening. Jacko
mumbled that he had been preparing his lecture notes. He said it in a
slighting sort of way, I thought, as though he felt that reading and
writing were hardly the occupations for a real man.

Pedro watched him as he spoke, quizzically, his eyes half-closed, a
faint and bitter smile playing about his lips. Then, like one speaking
to a disobedient dog, he said sharply, “Get the car out, Jacko. Less
talk, man.”

Jacko started with anger, but then turned on his heel and went to the
hotel garages, kicking the cobble stones in his irritation as he walked.

“You must watch that one, amigo,” said Pedro Moreno. “He is a good
man—for the purpose; but he is hasty. _I warn you._”

I made a mental note to plant my right on Jacko’s jaw immediately, if
anything started! Once he had time to get that knife out, then all the
right counters in the world would not be much use, it seemed!

Then the car appeared, a long black Jaguar, and shortly afterwards John
Hawke came out, dressed immaculately in a dark grey suit, and carrying a
hogskin brief-case. He got into the car without a word, sitting next to
Jacko in the front.

So we pulled out of Stratford, over the bridge and away south. I caught
a glimpse of the great red-brick theatre again, of the flowing Avon with
white swans gliding over its clear waters, of the coloured summer
dresses of the young girls as they floated, lying back in punts, smiling
up at the equally young men who laboured with the pole. . . . I saw all
this, and wondered for an instant whether it might not be for the last
time. For indeed, now my true mission had begun.

The Midlands countryside was rich with summer. Here and there
farm-workers slaved like anxious ants, getting in and storing the year’s
harvest, urging on their combine harvesters, their threshing machines.
There was life everywhere. And for some of us, perhaps, death lying
behind it all.

The countryside lay green and golden under the amber sunshine of that
early evening. An old man with a scythe moved gradually and rhythmically
down the grass-grown verge, cutting the lush greenstuff and laying it in
swathes on either side of him as he inched his way onwards. There seemed
something symbolic in that—the scythe, the reaper, time slowly eating
one’s days away. . . .

I gave an involuntary shudder and looked again at my companions in that
roaring car. Suppose they suspected me? Suppose when we came to a lonely
stretch, Jacko made use of that knife of his and then rolled the body
into a convenient ditch? Who would know?

Soon John Hawke took the wheel of the Jaguar. If Jacko drove well, this
man drove like a master. The car shot along the road as though propelled
from some immense bow. We cornered at speeds which put my heart into my
mouth.

Pedro looked at me, smiling, and said quietly, “Never be afraid, amigo.
It makes no difference to what will happen, you see. If the book says
that you are to die, then die you will, I assure you, afraid or not. It
is therefore stupid to spoil your last hour by being afraid, is it not?”

Jacko leaned against the window, asleep, it seemed. These men had
complete confidence in John Hawke, I could tell. I tried to be as
relaxed as they were, but it was not an easy thing to do.

Pedro said, “Motoring is the only sport of the future, amigo. The only
one left in which a man may test his courage, impersonally, without the
help of others. Not even bull-fighting can give you that—it is exciting
at first, yes, but it becomes a drug. In any case, there are always a
dozen others to assist you if the play goes wrong.”

The tyres screamed as we rounded two very sharp bends. John Hawke was
grinning when he spoke. “You shall bring us back, Pedro,” he said. “You
shall see if you can frighten us, my friend.”

The Spaniard yawned and said, “I should like that. Four of us in the car
will keep the wheels down.”

Then John Hawke said, “Perhaps there may not be four in the car—when we
come back, Pedro.”

My heart gave a sudden thump—and then he went on, “Perhaps Billy, here,
may want to go back to Birmingham and write about Macedonian
tunnel-graves, or something.”

So, I had told them _that_, when I had been half-delirious, after the
gunshot! I wondered what else they knew, but there was nothing I could
do about it now. I put on the bravest face I could and said, “There is
nothing I find less interesting than graves at the moment, Mr. Hawke, I
can assure you.”

He smiled but said no more. Then we were in Beltenham.

We passed through the Spa. Along the tree-lined avenues, gentle
middle-aged folk strolled sedately like superannuated galleons, thinking
of gardenias or stocks and shares, greeting their holiday acquaintances
with a courtly inclination of the head, or an easy wave of
lemon-coloured gloves.

In the distance, an orchestra played selections from “Iolanthe”. The
striped blinds of the Ice-Cream Parlours were painted in delicate pastel
shades. The policemen controlling the quiet traffic wore that eternally
patient look of men in training for the Papal Guard. Had a common earthy
smash-and-grab raid taken place at Beltenham that fine evening, the
world must surely have come to an end, have dissolved in a sudden
shivering of Venetian bubble-glass and meringues!

Jacko was staring through the window. “More poodles here than anywhere
else, Paris included,” he grunted. “And I should know. I drove a taxi in
Paris for five years.”

Pedro said, “You couldn’t drive a haycart, Jacko, my friend.”

Giacomo laughed hoarsely. “I could drive a nail through a board with my
fist, _mon ami_,” he said. “Could you do that?”

As he spoke, he beat one fist against his massive thigh, illustrating
the boast. Then, as though that ended the argument, he stared through
the window once more.

Soon we left the main thoroughfares and turned into a side road, green
and shadowy from the many trees which bordered it. There were few houses
here. Then we swung between two high gate-posts, the tops of which were
adorned by eagles, clasping stone shields in their worn claws. Before
us, at the end of a long avenue of oaks, I saw a low Tudor building, a
manor house, mellow in the light of the setting sun.

“Beltenham Hall,” said Hawke, smiling. “Perhaps our journey’s end, my
friends. Who knows?”

A tall and grey-haired man stood at the top of the steps that led into
the house. He smiled as we drew up before the house and then came down
to meet us, his hand outstretched.

“I am Colonel Mitchison,” he said. “My wife asks me to greet you, she is
busy inside with a few guests. You must come and join us for a glass of
sherry before the talk. We have Professor Lympne with us to-night, I’m
pleased to tell you. The Head of the local research station, you know.
He spent some time in Africa himself, and wants to hear what you have to
say.”

He led John Hawke into the house. Pedro and I followed them. Jacko
lifted the car bonnet and began to look inside.

“He does not care to leave the car,” said Pedro. “It is a mania with
him, amigo. He thinks it may suddenly decide to drive itself off and
leave him stranded. A simple man, my friend, a primitive, one might
say—but very loyal. Oh, yes, very loyal.”

In the high drawing-room, a group of people stood, their sherry glasses
in their hands, their voices jostling each other like a colony of
starlings. When they saw John Hawke, the talk stopped for a moment, and
some of them nodded to him, or bowed, as though they had met him before.
He passed among them like a powerful potentate, towards his hostess, who
immediately led him over to a short, thickset man in a rumpled tweed
suit.

This was Professor Lympne, then. The man who also had the secret that
Hawke wanted. I edged close towards them, wondering what would happen
now.

The Professor brushed back his shaggy hair with a heavy hand and peered
at John Hawke over his thick glasses. I noticed that he swayed on his
feet slightly, as though he might be tired from overwork, or perhaps
even a little tipsy.

“Ah, Hawke,” he said, “glad to meet you, my boy. Knew your father way
back—a fine fellow in his own way. Come over here and have another of
Mrs. Mitchison’s glasses of sherry. Grand stuff, hey?”

Before Hawke passed out of range, I heard him say, “I am glad to meet
you, Professor. You must tell me about things. I have been out of the
country so long, I have quite lost touch.”

And the Professor said thickly, “Knew your father, my boy. Glad to show
you round any time. Come on, here’s your drink.”

I would have followed them, but I felt the pressure of Pedro’s hand on
my arm. He smiled down at me. “Stay right here, amigo. The Master can
take care of this alone. Our job is to wait, nothing more.”

Then he began to talk to a horsy-looking woman about cattle-raising. She
was saying, “An Angus bull, sir, is the summit of creation, in my humble
opinion.” Her voice was very loud for such a humble person.

Pedro Moreno was nodding gravely as though he was giving great
consideration to her words, as though fifteen wild horses would never
drag from him his own cherished belief that, if there was such a thing
as the summit of creation, it would be a snorting black Miura bull, and
not a lumbering beast that couldn’t walk ten yards without stopping for
a rest.

And then our hostess called out, “Well, if we are all ready, we will go
to the conservatory and listen to Mr. Hawke. Please leave your glasses
anywhere. We will come back to them later.”

Pedro was still with the horsy woman. I turned back, a wild plan in my
mind suddenly, to find Colonel Mitchison. He was shepherding a lady with
a black velvet band round her neck, who leaned rather heavily on a thin
ebony stick.

“Colonel Mitchison,” I said, in some haste, “I want to warn you. . . .”

He smiled at me urbanely, but waved me aside without any qualms. “Must
see Mrs. Fitzwater in, my dear fellow,” he said. “Later, if you please.
Later, over a drink, eh?”

He passed on and there was nothing else I could do.


                                _Twelve_
                           Among the Tendrils

I looked anxiously at my watch. It was already nine o’clock. I felt that
this meeting had gone on long enough. We had been sitting, about seventy
of us, in a long cream-painted conservatory for almost an hour, among
the tendrils and the vines, the dark-green varnished leaves of
Mediterranean shrubs and the deep blood-red blooms of exotic plants. It
was a long narrow place, with windows giving on to the ballroom on our
right, and on our left tall glass panes through which we saw the
Cotswolds in the last rays of the sun.

But it was too hot, and the narrow canvas chairs too uncomfortable.

John Hawke stood before us in that warm conservatory, completely
confident, never even glancing at his notes, persuading the menfolk,
captivating the women. His hold over them was magnificent, I had to
admit that. It was hard to believe that this handsome man with the
splendid voice was a foreign agent, a potential murderer of the very
folk to whom his words were addressed that night—a fine but vicious
animal, a beast of prey, no less. Yet that was the truth of the matter.

Among the clustered flowers, his voice rose imperceptibly to an almost
ecstatic level. He ended by describing a Masai lion hunt in which he had
been allowed to take part, standing with the warriors, armed only with a
light hide shield and a thin spear. His listeners sat on the edges of
their seats, enthralled.

Even the old lady, Mrs. Fitzwater, had stopped whispering, and now gazed
at him with rapt attention. Colonel and Mrs. Mitchison were smiling at
each other, congratulating themselves on the success of their
lecture-party. Only Professor Lympne seemed unmoved; he had slumped back
in his canvas chair and, with his thick hand over his face, had all the
appearance of a man who had gone to sleep.

In the sunset, among the warmth, the sighing leaves and the heavy scent
of flowers, Africa came to life for most of us, however, and it was only
with the greatest difficulty that I kept myself to my resolution to warn
Mitchison at the first possible opportunity.

Then I was aware of another voice, speaking enthusiastic words of
thanks, and afterwards of the rattle of handclapping. I rose quickly,
hoping to cut off the Colonel or the Professor. Just as I did so, an
elderly man wearing a snuff-coloured waistcoat and heavy checks put his
hand on my arm. “A good bit of speaking, that,” he said. “Don’t you
think so, sir?”

I nodded, trying to move away from him.

He caught my sleeve. “Not old Gilchrist’s lad, are you, sir? I seem to
see a strong resemblance, what?”

I assured him that I was not the person he took me for, and then made
for the Colonel. But I was too late; he was supporting old Mrs.
Fitzwater once more, proceeding at the pace of a hearse. In my haste, I
made a spot decision—I would get into the drawing-room before them all
and hope to catch the Colonel, or Mrs. Mitchison there.

At the end of the glass-walled passage-way that led into the house again
stood Giacomo, his hands deep in his overcoat pockets, in an attitude of
waiting, for something, for someone.

If I rushed past him, he would become suspicious, I knew. I did the only
thing I could think of and linked my arm in that of a calm-looking young
woman in a dark suit. She looked at me with mild surprise, her mouth
open slightly. I saw that she was very pretty.

I spoke rapidly, giving her no time to reply.

“A most amazing fellow, Gerald,” I said. “Known him years. Why, only
last year, on the Nursery Slope at Saint Anton, he bet me he dared go
right through the fence at the bottom and into the station yard—and, by
gosh, he did! Almost caught the train to Innsbruck at the same time!”

We were past Giacomo then. He was standing with his eyes wide open, the
expression of a pole-axed elephant on his face. I waved to him slightly.

The young woman said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know your friend.
Naturally, if he interests you so much, I should be pleased to hear more
about him, but. . . .”

I said, “Thank you for your help, madam, and please forgive my bad
manners.”

“It was a pleasure,” she began, with a smile, but I had to leave her
then. She stared after me as I hurried, shrugged her shoulders very
prettily, and then walked on, convinced that I was a lunatic, no doubt.

I almost burst into the drawing-room, and then I stopped. Mrs. Mitchison
was there, _but she was talking to Pedro_. They had come in by another
door, no doubt, and had beaten me to it while the man in the
snuff-coloured waistcoat had been discussing my lineage.

Pedro said, “Ha! Amigo Billy back again. Do come and talk to our
hostess, Billy. She is interested in growing orchids. I am sure you will
be able to advise her.”

Now I do not know an orchid when I see one, if I ever do, which is
unlikely. And as for keeping up a conversation about them—well, I
should find it easier to discuss the Theory of Relativity. But there was
little I could do. I found myself between Pedro and Mrs. Mitchison, very
neatly caught, and that was that.

In the tall mirror before me, I saw John Hawke come in, together with
Colonel Mitchison and the Professor, and I knew I was hamstrung then.

“Well,” Mrs. Mitchison was saying, “and so I bought another dozen of the
same sort. And do you know, every one of them turned out to be failures.
Yes, complete and utter flops! Now what would you put that down to, Mr.
Billy?”

Pedro smiled slyly as I struggled for breath.

I said, “Madam, I imagine you must have fed them too lavishly. That is
all I can think of.”

She considered for a moment and then touched me lightly on the shoulder.
“My dear boy, I do declare you are right,” she said. “Look, I will go
and tell Arthur. He will be most interested.”

I saw her go, in the mirror, and saw her husband try to shoo her away
from his conversation with Hawke and the Professor. Then she disappeared
into another part of the long room, hailing an old friend.

Pedro said austerely, “These women are charming, but oh so difficult,
once one becomes entangled in their conversation. In Spain, now, it is
unknown for women to mix on such sociable terms with the men. We keep
them, as one might say, in their place. It makes for ease of working,
amigo!”

Then I saw Hawke nod to him as though calling him over. When Pedro
returned to me he said, “They are going down to look at the Research
Station. We are to wait here till they return.”

On an impulse, I said, “Not in Hawke’s car, I hope. It might be
recognized later.”

Pedro looked down at me, the tiny creases in his dark face showing as he
smiled.

“Do not tell Hawke his business, little one,” he said. “He knows what he
is doing. But, to satisfy your curiosity, I will tell you, they are
going in the Colonel’s car. He will bring Hawke back later. We wait for
him here. See?”

Then I saw them go out. I suppose I could have shouted out to all
present that this man Hawke was an enemy agent, that he should not be
shown anything of importance—but no one would have believed me. I
should have been thrown out of the place, for Giacomo to deal with, no
doubt. So, I was quiet. I accepted another dainty sandwich and another
glass of Chablis, and then I sat down to await the return of Hawke, with
Mrs. Fitzwater on one side of my chair, and Mrs. Mitchison on the other.

It would not have been so bad if I could have sat with the young lady in
the dark suit—but she was surrounded by young men with flowing
moustaches, and the sort of clothes which proclaimed them to be either
horsemen or the drivers of high-powered sports cars.

I sighed silently and settled down to listen to the gossip of the two
mature ladies. It was concerned largely with Christian names; marriages,
deaths and births came into it with depressing regularity. My opinion
was not now asked. I was beaten.

It was almost ten o’clock when the Colonel’s Bentley purred to a stop
outside the door. Most of the guests had gone and Mrs. Fitzwater had
talked herself gently into a state of coma.

Pedro touched me on the shoulder. “Come,” he said. “The Master is
waiting outside.”

The Colonel and Mrs. Mitchison saw us off, waving as we went down the
drive.

Hawke said, “Pair of delightful morons! But I would shoot a wife who was
as talkative as that.”

Pedro said, “English women are given too much freedom. They are a
hindrance to men of action.”

Jacko grunted and said, “You forget, Englishmen are not men of action.”

In the back of that car I smiled, hoping that one day I might blow a
hole in the Corsican’s theory.

As we drove on into the open country, John Hawke said, “It looks a
simple job, my friends. Lympne had had a little too much of Mrs.
Mitchison’s good sherry to be as discreet as he should have been. He has
an immense regard for my late dear father, I’m afraid, and that, I fear,
lulled him into the traditional false sense of security.”

Pedro said, “He showed you round? Showed you everything?”

Hawke nodded. “As much as I need to know. The papers we want are in a
little safe in his office. We can blow the office door in with the large
calibre pistol. A stick of the other stuff will open the safe.”

Jacko said lazily, “Are there any guards?”

The Master said quietly, “Three works policemen, that is all, apart from
a young fellow who sometimes works late. We saw his light on while we
were going round. Some brilliant young physicist who is looking for fame
quickly.”

“He may get it,” said Jacko. “But he may not know about it!”

My blood ran cold at his callous words.

And then we turned up a heavily rutted lane, and soon passed away from
the belt of trees we had traversed, and so out on to a rolling stretch
of countryside, flattish and surrounded by a high fence of barbed wire
supported by iron posts.

Hawke waved his hand towards the fence. “Electrified,” he said.
“Connecting to the police hut at the far end of the grounds. We shall
have to take a chance and cut it with the insulated shears, then we must
work fast. I suggest that Jacko stays with the car at the point where we
cut it, and we two”—he indicated Pedro—“dash for the office block.
Then the police will be put off the scent long enough for us to get what
we want.”

He turned and stared at me. “Stay with Jacko,” he said. “We may need
some strong-arm stuff, if we are to get back into the car safely.”

I began to say something, I forget what, I was so worried—but Hawke
gave me such a blank stare of hostility that I could go no further. I
nodded, as though I meant to obey his orders.

Then we drew up about two hundred yards from a low block of buildings,
apparently of white concrete, that gleamed in the rising summer
moonlight.

Pedro patted me on the knee. “Just stay in the car, amigo,” he
whispered. “This is work for experts. Jacko will tell you when he needs
your help. Just keep that car empty of policemen for when we get
back—that is all we ask. Good luck!”

I did not reply. If I had tried to do so, I am afraid my teeth would
have chattered. Then they were out of the car, bending down near the
high wire fence. I saw that they were both wearing dark shining gloves
which came up to the elbows.

In the front seat, Jacko lit a vile-smelling cheroot and grunted, “If
they work fast, they should get what they want inside ten minutes. But
if the police are awake, they should be here within five. The Boss says
there are three policemen, but only two are likely to investigate this.
They must leave one by the phone. That makes it two for two, my friend.
And let me tell you, they are likely to be old policemen! Works
policemen, you know, not big rough ones, eh?”

He laughed, confidently, and drew on his cheroot until the car was full
of the raw fumes. I opened the window.

Hawke and Pedro were through the wire and were streaking off into the
dusk, in the direction of the concrete block of buildings. I lost them
quickly in the failing light.

Somewhere over that expanse of rolling grassland, an owl hooted as it
floated above the ground, looking for mice. Above our heads a small
flock of birds hurried home, chittering with fear. It was a very lonely
place.

I listened at that open window then, wondering if I would hear anything
from the building. I thought I heard what might have been a pistol shot,
but I was not sure.

But there was no mistaking the dull roar of the explosive. It sounded
like the distant boom of an immense drum, somewhere below the earth.

Jacko turned in his seat and smiled. I saw his yellow, irregular teeth
in the moonlight and hated him. “That is it,” he said. “_Tout va bien,
mon ami!_ All goes well.”

Even as he spoke, a dark figure materialized on the other side of the
wire fence from us. It was a policeman on a bicycle. He was puffing with
the effort of pedalling across that rough expanse of grassland.

“Hey, you,” he called. “What’s the big idea?”

His was the voice of a middle-aged man. Jacko smiled evilly, I saw his
face in the glow of his cheroot.

The policeman flung down his bicycle and bent near the hole in the
fence.

“So that’s the game,” he said. “A break through, hey?”

He turned and blew his whistle. Away across the field, in a gleam of
moonlight, I saw another policeman, pedalling furiously but moving
slowly, like a comic policeman in a dream.

Then I saw Giacomo slide his long knife from his jacket and climb from
the car to meet the policeman, who was now struggling to make his way
between the cut strands.

[Illustration]

I was out of that car immediately, right behind the Corsican. As he
raised his arm, I caught him by the wrist and held him.

“Not that way, Jacko,” I said. The Corsican half-turned, his eyes full
of fury. I think he would have stabbed me at that moment, if he could
have shaken himself free.

Then the policeman was upright and coming at us. He was a brave man.

“All right, mister,” he said, “you can drop that knife.”

He rushed at Jacko and caught him by the arm.

I shouted at the man, “Get away, you fool. You’ll get hurt. You can’t do
anything now. Get away!”

“Oh, can’t I?” said the policeman, and he grasped Jacko about the waist,
wrestling with him. I broke away from them, Jacko’s knife in my hand. At
least I had disarmed him, but that was not enough.

As I watched the struggling figures, waiting for an opening, Hawke and
Pedro burst out of the dusk, flung themselves through the hole in the
wire fence and came towards the car. They were so intent on their own
affairs that they did not see what was happening, immediately.

Pedro called out, “Start the engine Jacko, you fool. There is a
policeman coming on a bicycle. He’ll be here in thirty seconds!”

Then they saw that two men were struggling, in the shadow of the long
black car, and that Jacko was pinned down in a wrestling hold by the
grey-haired policeman.

Pedro flung open a door and said to me, “Get in. This is a bad
business.”

His sudden strength was such that I found myself sprawling on the back
seat then. Through the window I saw Hawke bend over the policeman. Pedro
ran towards him. “No!” he said. “No!” I heard the muffled report of a
pistol and a sudden sharp cry. Then Hawke swung himself into the driving
seat, almost dragging Jacko with him. Pedro got in beside me: he was
trembling.

The car engine roared, he let in the clutch and trod hard on the
accelerator. And we were screaming away down the loosely metalled lane
again, into the dusk.

I looked back through the window for an instant and saw that the second
policeman was now bending down over the still form in the roadway. I
think I heard him blowing his whistle, helplessly, lonely on that
deserted road.

Then I was aware that Pedro was talking to me. “We did wrong, not
leaving you with a weapon. You could have helped Jacko, then,” he said.
His voice was strained, as though this sort of work did not suit him
entirely.

Jacko said, breathing thickly, “He stopped me from settling that
policeman. He took my knife.”

“What could I do?” I answered. “I couldn’t let you _kill_ a man, just
like that. If you’d left him to me, I could have knocked him cold. But
you can’t _just kill a man_.”

From the driver’s seat, Hawke said coldly, “But that is what we have had
to do, my friend.”

Beside me, Pedro gave a sudden little groan. “That young scientist met
us, when we blew the door in,” he said. “He was still working late. He
had met us when we visited the place with Professor Lympne. He would
have recognized us again. It had to be.”

I buried my face in my hands. This was horrible. Yet I was powerless to
do anything. I had done what I could.

At last I said, “Is the policeman—dead, too?”

Hawke shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows,” he said. “In times like
these, the death of two may prevent the deaths of thousands. The papers
we have taken may cancel out the deaths of two obscure creatures many,
many times.”

When we had turned again into another quiet lane, Jacko got out of the
car and changed the number-plates. He put the old ones back into the
boot and very carefully locked them up.

As we still stood by the roadside, a young man on a motor-bike pulled
alongside us. In our lights, his face was ruddy and cheerful.

“Can I trouble you for a light, mate?” he said to Hawke. “I’ve just been
to a dance over at Sodbury and left my matches there!”

I sensed that Jacko was moving over towards him, a spanner in his hand,
and for a moment I thought of appealing to this young man to stand with
me in a rough and tumble with the three. Then Hawke flicked his lighter
and the young man smiled up at him.

“That’s a nice lighter, mate,” he said, cheerily as he drew on his
cigarette. “Bet your girl gave it to you. Birthday present, hey?”

Hawke nodded, gently. “That’s it—mate,” he said. He reminded me of an
eagle trying to be mildly sociable with a plump pigeon.

The young man nodded, as though pleased with his powers of observation.
Then he kicked his machine into life again and bumped off along the
road.

Hawke passed his strong hand over his brow and then started the engine
up again.

Jacko sat down beside him, glowering and cheated, his mouth open and
sagging. I realized then that he was a natural killer—nothing more;
worth no more consideration, no more mercy, than a man-eating lion.

We stayed that night at a quiet grey stone inn in the Cotswolds. Hawke
greeted the landlord cheerfully, as though they had met before.

“Been up in the Lake District again, Mr. Cooper?” asked the landlord, as
he led us into the dining-room.

Hawke nodded. “Yes, Jack,” he said. “We’ve had nothing but rain all the
five days.”

The landlord clucked. “Oh,” he said, “you should’ve spent your holiday
down here, sir. Lovely weather we’ve been having, right glorious
weather. Can’t say when we’ve had such a good summer.”

Pedro sighed and the man turned to him. “I see your friend, Mr. Foster,
is as tired as ever! Well, sir, we’ll soon have some supper laid for
you. Some nice beef and pickled onions, hey? And a pot of good strong
tea? Just the sort my Missus knows how to make, hey?”

He went out, chattering to himself.

Pedro rolled his eyes. “English food,” he said, putting his hand to his
stomach. “Oh, but it kills me!”

I thought of the two men lying dead in the research station when he said
that. Bitterly I punched my fist against the oaken doorpost, accusing
myself of betraying them, of hanging back when I might have saved them.

Then reason came back to me again. What could I have done, after all?
What could I have done, apart from lying out there with them, under the
moon and no longer able to get revenge for them on these wild beasts?


                               _Thirteen_
                         Pass-on at Porchester

I got downstairs before the others. The landlord was sweeping out the
bar-parlour and whistling.

“Looks like rain to-day, sir,” he said. “And after what I was saying to
Mr. Cooper last night! It just shows—it pays to keep your mouth shut.”

“I wonder,” I said, staring at him. He swept on past me.

Then I asked him if the morning paper had come. He shook his head. “Nay,
it never gets out to here much afore dinner time,” he said. “We have to
be contented with the B.B.C. Morning News.”

He brushed on for a moment, while I pretended to examine a row of
horse-brasses that hung from a low beam. Then he said, “Shockin’ affair,
that shootin’ business out at Beltenham last night.”

I did my best to seem disinterested. “Oh,” I said, “what was that?”

“They don’t seem to know, rightly, yet; but it seems some fellows cut
their way through the wire and blew a safe. Then they shot a man who
works there—didn’t kill him, as luck would have it. On the way out they
shot a policeman. A fellow with a family too.”

I hardly dared ask the question. “Is he dead?”

The landlord nodded, bitterly. “They ought to get a taste of their own
medicine,” he said. “But no doubt they will—the fellow they wounded,
the scientist chap, has given a description of them, the B.B.C. says.
And another policeman who came up a bit too late saw their car. Says
it’s a dark blue Austin, he thinks. Or a black Morris. He can’t swear
which—but he got the first three letters of their registration, so that
should help.”

I nodded. “Yes, that should help,” I said bitterly. “How many men broke
in then?”

The man scratched his greying head. “The scientist says two, I think;
but the second policeman thinks there were at least three, perhaps
another one in the car.”

He leaned on his brush and grinned, “Why, sir,” he said, “if they’d only
been in a black Jaguar and only four of ’em—why, it might have been
you, hey?”

He began to laugh at his joke, and I was as near as anything to saying
simply, “Yes—it was us. Go for the police, I beg you!”

But then Jacko came in, stumbling over the uneven floor and glowering at
both of us. The landlord wished him good morning, but he did not answer.
And when the man had gone out to order our breakfast, Jacko continued to
glower at me, as though he wished he might say something but could not
frame it in words sufficiently brutal.

I looked back at him, daring him to speak his thoughts, and at last his
eyes fell away from mine and he struck himself again and again with
clenched fist on the thigh, a speechless brute.

Before we had all finished breakfast, the rain which the landlord had
forecast came down in torrents.

Hawke took me aside and said quietly, “I can see your point of view
about last night. But don’t let it get to be a habit; I’m warning you,
my friend.”

I said, “One of them died. The scientist is alive.”

He nodded. “I heard the News on a radio in my room,” he said. “It would
have been better if it had been the other way about. The policeman
didn’t see us. But the other one has given descriptions of myself and
Pedro. That means you will have to carry out the next step
yourself—Jacko hasn’t the brains—he’s a butcher, nothing more. No one
saw you.”

I said, “What is the next step?”

He placed his long finger at the side of his nose and with half-shut
eyes said, “Don’t be so anxious. I shall begin to think you want to know
too much, my friend. Perhaps you do already, but I must take a chance.”

Then he turned away from me and went back to Pedro who lolled in the
only easy chair in that room. I was left standing by the window,
wondering whether, after all, John Hawke was playing a cat and mouse
game with me. Then I noticed that my legs were trembling, as they always
do when I am excited. I felt that I must control such evidence of
weakness, and went out to the backyard, where Jacko was polishing the
sinister-looking black Jaguar, and giving an extra rub to the bright
number-plates—as though inviting anyone who wished to take a look at
them.

He ignored me when I stood beside him. I smiled down at him then, for I
had his measure, I thought. How mistaken one can be, though, in matters
such as this!

Early that evening we set off to Porchester in a cold grey drizzle of
rain, the sort of weather one may expect at almost any season in
England.

On the way Hawke sat with me at the back of the car. He spoke quietly
and with authority, as one who gives orders and does not permit
questions.

“Precisely at seven,” he said, “you will go into a Milk Bar in
Porchester—the ‘Spotted Cow’—and there you will see a man with a black
brief-case, bearing the monogram ‘G.R.’. He has the middle finger
missing on his right hand. I cannot describe him any further since I do
not know what particular character part he may be playing at the
moment.”

“What if he is not there?” I said.

Hawke pursed his lips tightly before he replied. “He will be, never
fear. His life would not be worth a button if he slipped up on this
assignment. He would be of no further use to anyone. He would be found
on a railway line, or in a public incinerator.”

I said, “Very well, what do I do then?”

He glared at me and then said, “You will stand by him at the counter and
let him see that you are wearing a ring which I shall give you. Then he
will drop his brief-case, as though by accident, and you will pick it
up. The flap will be open and you will put this package into the case
before you rise and hand it back to him. Do you understand?”

I nodded and John Hawke handed to me a long manilla envelope, not very
bulky, but somehow electrical to the touch. As I stared at it he put a
ring into my hand.

“On the third finger of the right hand,” he said. “Don’t lose it.”

It was a broad silver ring, with the letter “H” engraved on its front,
nothing more.

Then he said, “When you have done that, you will walk back to the car,
which will be waiting for you.”

I dared to ask, “And what after that?”

He smiled and said, “Who knows, my friend? Ah, who knows?”

I put on what show of annoyance I could and said, “What about a pay-off
for me, Mr. Hawke? I’ve done what you asked, so far. What do I get?”

He gazed through the window of the fast-moving car for a while. Then at
last he turned back to me and said, “The best I can offer you is a berth
on a boat that sails from Cardiff the night after to-morrow. You will
travel with us, and perhaps make your fortune—somewhere or other.”

I said, “What if that doesn’t suit me, Mr. Hawke?”

He lowered his head as he said, “I have only told you what the best
offer is, my friend. I have not mentioned the worst. Do you understand
me?”

I nodded. He slapped me on the thigh and said, “Grasp your chances when
they come, my friend. Sail to a new life with us on the _Nautilus_, my
boy. But don’t try to do anything at all silly to-night. On an occasion
like this, I would even risk sending Jacko after you, if
any—misunderstanding arose. See?”

I nodded, and then we came into Porchester.


                               _Fourteen_
                  The Spotted Cow and the Budgerigars

No doubt in Roman times, when it was first built, Porchester was a
pleasant enough place, with a broad river flowing through it and gentle
hills standing round it, mellow in the clear light. But as I first saw
it, in the early evening, the town had lost all claim to beauty. The
oily river was spanned by gaunt and rusty iron bridges; the hills looked
dark and gloomy against the rain-clouds, their only function being to
give some foundation to the massive electric pylons which straddled the
smoking town. The grey rain slanted down through the grey air on to the
grey roads. Even the passers-by in their grey raincoats had a certain
greyish look about their faces.

Pedro said wryly, “Ah, Mexico City is the place I shall retire to, with
its sun and its great white roads. And I shall keep my memory of this
place as a convenient nightmare to turn on when I become too complacent
there and want a change.”

Jacko grunted. “Budapest is the only place, _mon ami_,” he said. “There
a man may do as he pleases, without policemen standing at his elbow at
all hours of the day.”

Pedro smiled at him and answered, “You will never see Buda again, my ox.
The policemen will hang you for six murders before then!”

Hawke tapped him on the shoulder then, and said sternly, “Keep your mind
on the job, bull-fighter. You turn right at the next traffic lights. The
Spotted Cow is five hundred yards along the road, just past a narrow
alleyway with a lamp stuck on to the wall.”

It was as he said. We pulled into the kerb. The car clock said six
fifty-eight. In two minutes I should meet the man with the black
brief-case.

“Pedro will wait for you a hundred yards down the road. He will keep the
engine running,” said Hawke. “Waste no time, my friend. Mistakes can
happen in the craziest ways. And don’t forget, if you are not back here
within five minutes, Jacko will come to look for you. Good luck. I hope
you don’t put him to that trouble.”

I nodded casually to him and walked through the rain, dodging cars,
towards the bright window of the “Spotted Cow”. The Jaguar purred on
down the road and stopped again by the kerb.

As I entered the Milk Bar, I was met by the sound of raucous voices and
the heavy smell of damp clothes. The place was crowded with young folk
and with men from the factories, to judge by their oil-stained clothes.
I tried to push my way to the counter, and met with some opposition.

“Hey, who’re you shovin’?” asked a big man with a smear of coal-dust
across his face.

“Sorry, chum,” I said, “I’ve got to catch a train. Just had word my
brother’s got home from abroad—forty-eight hours leave—want a bit of
grub before I go down to Southampton to meet him.”

The big man nodded and smiled. “Right, mate,” he said. “We’ll move some
o’ these lazy lay-abouts. Hey there, gangway, mind your backs, you lot!”

I found myself at the counter. “Glass of malted milk and an egg
sandwich,” I told the tired faced girl.

She wiped a damp wisp of hair from her forehead and turned to get my
order. “Some folk are never happy unless they are pushin’ and shovin’,”
she said to the other girl.

Then I noticed him—the man with the black brief-case. He was standing
next to me, on my right. I placed my hand on the counter, so that he
could see the silver ring. He laid his on top of his coffee cup and I
saw that he lacked the middle finger of his right hand.

The girl said, “Wake up, dreamboat! You were in a hurry a minute ago.
Well, here’s your order.”

I apologized and paid her. She went away, muttering to herself about the
world in general, and Milk Bars in particular.

The man with the black brief-case said, “Turned out quite miserable,
hasn’t it?” His voice was thin and nasal, a mean and undistinguished
voice.

He was a thin-faced little fellow with a clipped brown moustache and a
rather tired-looking black homburg hat. His dark grey overcoat was badly
frayed at the sleeves. I would have put him down as an unsuccessful
commercial traveller at the best.

I nodded to him. He smiled, a pale, weary smile. His teeth were
discoloured by tobacco. His finger-nails were not particularly clean. I
noticed that they were ragged at the edge, as though he bit them.

My mind raced; is this what a spy looks like? I asked myself. I had
always thought of them as being, well, more in the John Hawke
class—perhaps dark and suave, well-dressed, even flashy. But this
nondescript mouse of a man . . .

Just then he said, “Oh, bother it! And I can’t bend. This leg of mine,
you know. . . . Got it hurt at Alamein.”

The brief-case fell on to my feet. This was going exactly to plan. As I
bent to retrieve it, I suddenly knew what I must do if I was to satisfy
my conscience, to avenge those good fellows who had been shot and killed
the night before, if I was to serve my country! I must see that this
little rat was handed over to the police and must then set the
hue-and-cry on John Hawke and his murderers.

I made the movement of slipping that envelope into the bag and then rose
with it in my hand. “Your bag, sir,” I said, smiling.

“Awfully kind of you, I’m sure,” he said, grinning and reaching out for
it.

The next moment, under cover of that black brief-case, I was gripping
his wrist with all my force. I saw his eyes widen so that the little
black pupils stood out in a circle of blue and white. His pale mouth
began to word some startled protest.

And I muttered to him, between clenched teeth, “That’s the lot, son.
You’ve run your course. _Come on quietly outside. I’ll find a home for
you._”

Then, crushed against the counter by the crowding workmen, I suddenly
felt an agonizing pain as the little man brought up his knee into my
groin. I gasped but held on to him, and then I heard his thin voice cry
out, “Pickpocket! Hold him, he’s got my watch!”

He had slipped his wrist clear from my hand and flicked that covering
brief-case away. Yes, I was left clutching his gold watch and bracelet.
It was the most perfect frame-up one could have imagined.

Instantly the good fellows behind me hustled forward to grasp my arms.
The little man edged along the counter and towards the door.

“I’ll get a copper,” he said. “Hold him, I’ll be right back.”

The man with the smear across his face looked at me with contempt. “So
that’s your lark, is it, chum?” he said. “And I got you a place by the
counter, you dirty dog!”

At first I thought he was going to punch me in the face. So did the two
men who were holding me. Some instinct of fair play made them loose me
so that I could defend myself, and in that moment I had ducked down and
was bundling my way to the door.

“That man is a spy!” I yelled. “I’m no thief!”

The chorus of sneering disbelief would have upset me at any other time.
But now there was no time for self-esteem—I had got to get out quickly,
before that little man had somehow warned Hawke and his thugs.

I was through that swing door like a rugger forward, then, ducking low
so that they would not see which way I took, I swung left and into the
little alleyway that Hawke had mentioned earlier, the one with the pale
gas-lamp on its corner. Then I was racing like a madman along the
cobbles.

If they had followed immediately, they would have seen me; but my final
rush had taken them all by surprise, and gave me five extra seconds in
which to get myself sorted out.

Fifty yards up the alleyway there was another turning, which swung round
in a wildish arc. I took that, and as I turned into the sweep of this
narrow street, I saw lights in a shop window on a corner. It was a
tobacconist’s and its blue blind was just coming down. They were
shutting shop.

Even as the door came slowly to, I pushed inside and stood, gasping for
breath, staring about me in that bright gas-lit place. A man wearing a
blue apron looked at me quickly. Then he pushed the bolt across the shop
door and turned down the gas.

I had time to see his lined and haggard face, the thin fringe of grey
hair above his ears, his bare shirt-sleeved arms, muscular and wiry. He
seemed a capable man.

“Go through that curtain into the back room, mate,” he said.

I did as he said, edging past piles of magazines, comic papers, sweet
boxes and cigarette cartons, towards the long strip of red plush which
he indicated.

As I drew the curtain behind me I heard the sound of running feet. I
paused, at the foot of the narrow stairs, tense with fear. There was a
knock on the door and I heard the man drawing the bolt. He seemed to be
looking outside, for another voice came to me clearly.

“’As anybody come in here?” said the voice. “There’s a pickpocket on the
loose.”

The man in the apron said slowly, “I ain’t ’ad nobody in ’ere since
six-thirty. There was a few chaps listenin’ to my wireless then, Sports
Report, it was. But nobody since.”

“Well, lock your doors to-night,” said the voice. Then the footsteps
moved away again.

The plush curtain opened and the man stood there, staring me hard in the
eye.

“Go in there,” he said, “it’s my back room.” His voice was cold.

It was a square box, nothing more, its walls covered with a dark
varnished wallpaper. Here and there, hung photographs of a woman with
thick black hair done up in the style of an earlier reign, her face
pale, her eyes heavy and staring out of the faded pictures. A fire
glowed in a small square grate. A tin kettle was hissing on the hearth.

“Sit down,” said the man, in a voice so expressionless that I did not
know whether he liked me or hated me. It did not matter which just then.

I sat in a hard Windsor chair beside the fire. He went to the corner and
reaching up whipped a square of green baize from a big cage that hung
there. In it were three budgerigars, blinking in the light, swinging on
their trapezes, chuckling and whistling away with the excitement of
their nightly treat.

[Illustration]

The man had forgotten me it seemed. He spoke to the birds calling them
by their pet names, telling them how lovely they were, letting them take
seed from his lips, but ignoring my presence. At last he turned round to
me and said, “They were my wife’s birds. They kept her company. She
adored them.” He pointed to the pictures about the wall. “That is my
wife,” he said. “Of course, that was when she was much younger. She left
this world three years ago. These are her birds.”

I thought I understood the man’s sad voice, his haggard looks, but I was
wrong. I knew nothing.

Suddenly he came to where I sat and stood before me.

“What did you pinch, matey?” he asked, in as quiet a voice as before.
“Let’s see it. What was it?”

I smiled and said, “I’m no thief, sir. I was wrongfully accused in the
‘Spotted Cow’. They said I took a man’s wrist watch. But he was trying
to fix me, so that he could get away.”

The man still looked down at me, his expression unchanged.

“What did you take, chum?” he said. “Come on, let’s be knowing, or out
you go. I’ll help a man in trouble, but he’s got to own up.”

I said, “I swear that I am not a thief, that I have done nothing wrong.
It is a misunderstanding.”

He walked back to the cage of budgerigars and stood talking to them for
a moment. Then he turned and said, “Jacky and Sammy believe you, but Liz
doesn’t. Ah, she’s a knowing one, is that bird. My wife’s favourite.”

He paused for a moment, his great knuckles resting on the edge of the
plain deal table. Then he said, “I was put down—Wormwood Scrubs—for
three years once. My wife died while I was inside. Only these birds to
keep her company while I was away. I swore, when they let me out, I’d
fight the police till the day I died for that. That’s the only reason I
had for letting you in to-night, mate.”

I stood up and said, “Thank you a thousand times. I still say that I did
nothing. I can say no more.”

He looked through me, into a past that I could not share. Then he sighed
and slowly walked towards a little back door.

“You’re not my sort, mister,” he said. “Sorry, and no offence meant. You
can go out the back way. The door’s nailed up, you’ll not open it. Climb
over it and you’ll come into a passage-way between two walls. There’s a
gate at the end of it that you’ll have to shin over. Then you’re in a
little street that runs parallel to the main road, the one the ‘Spotted
Cow’s’ in. Good luck. But don’t come back, you’re not my sort. I’ve
never seen you.”

He had shut the door even while I was struggling through his backyard,
among the empty crates and packing-cases. I stumbled many times, to the
music of the three budgerigars, which were now singing as though their
pathetic hearts would burst. Then I was over the gate and into the
little passage he had told me of. It ran between two rows of houses,
back giving on to back, and most of my time I was trying to avoid
stepping into the little runnel at my feet.

Somewhere behind me, far away, I heard a policeman’s whistle blowing,
again and again, and the sound of angry voices. I bent low, foolishly,
between the two high and jagged glass-topped walls, and ran onwards in
the direction the man had told me of.

The cold damp air beat on my face for a time, and then, in the darkness,
the draught ceased. I realized that I must be near to that last gate
which he had mentioned. _I was_—I had hit it with my head before that
sixth sense, which warns one in the dark, could take control.

There were two horizontal beams to that gate and it was an easy matter
to climb it. The only difficulty was a row of sharp spikes at the top.
All my attention was focussed on them, so that I should not tear a piece
out of my shin as I jumped down on the other side.

I was poised in mid-air, feeling the sharp spikes through my shoe soles,
about to fall forward into the alley below me, when I first saw Jacko.
He was waiting for me, under the wall at the other side of the narrow
street, a strange expression on his dark face.

As in the terror of a dream, I felt myself moving towards him against my
will. I had jumped and could do nothing about the force of gravity. If I
could have done so, I would have shot backwards on to that gate, into
that little passage, into that friendly shop with the budgerigars.

But Isaac Newton had spoken, and I must go forward! Then as I fell, I
cursed myself for an idiot. I still had those papers in my pocket, in
their neat manilla envelope—and I could have destroyed them, have burnt
them in that little box-like room, with the birds whistling in the
corner, and that pale face staring through space into sad eternity.


                               _Fifteen_
                            Back Alley Boys

I have to admit that as I fell I was suddenly very afraid. Then, almost
automatically, I leapt back a pace, into the middle of the narrow
alleyway, where I could get a glimmer or two from a street-lamp to help
me in whatever I had to do.

I called out. “Stay where you are, Jacko! I’d hate to hurt you!” But
this was more to keep my own courage up than to scare him, I knew.

Hunched and snuffling like the ancient bull of Crete, he came out of the
shadows at me. I knew that it was no use trying to run away from him; he
had already shown his turn of speed by the way in which he had run round
the block to cut me off. Besides, if I ran back up the street, I should
undoubtedly meet any other pursuers who might be on my trail. I knew
that I had to stay and fight this out, so, without another thought I
whipped off my hampering jacket and flung it from me into the road.

Then Giacomo was on me, his great hands outstretched to break my neck. I
slipped gently to my right as he came in and gave him a hard short-arm
jab with my left. I heard him grunt, but I knew that I had not delivered
a killer. I could feel that he was heavily dressed, with layer on layer
of clothes. It was no good trying to impress him there, I thought, I
must come up a bit!

His hands were on my shoulders then and I did the only thing possible,
pulled back and uppercut him just as hard as I could. And this time I
_knew_ I had hit the mark! He staggered back, his arms wide open, and
fell on to his back, his brown eyes rolling.

I stood away for a moment, getting my breath, and just a little
satisfied, too satisfied, when with an astonishing recovery he kicked
sideways, knocking my feet from under me. I had sense to stagger and get
my balance, and then he was at me once more, driving me like fury
against the opposite wall.

Now I knew that I must fight for my life, for his face was contorted
with anger and humiliation. Giacomo, a born bully, could not tolerate
such contemptuous treatment as I had given him. He was of the type who
would rather die than be beaten, once he started to fight.

Then I did something which I despise myself for. Pinned against that
concrete wall, my arms by my side, I used my knee on him. I felt a
coward as I did so, but it was my life against the Queensbury rules at
that moment.

He doubled up, loosing my arms, and I slipped away from him along the
wall. At first I thought I was free, but he had snatched out and caught
my shirt-sleeve and would not let go. All the time he was wheezing hard
and trying to get his breath back. But his grip was that of an oak vice.
I could not get away from him.

Once more I broke the rules and kicked back, hoping to get his shins.
Instead, he caught my leg and flung it upwards violently. Then I was
down on my face in the road and Giacomo was on me. I knew that this was
_it_—for he was so heavy that I could not hope to budge him.

I said, with an attempt at humour, “All right, Jacko! You win! Let me
get up or you’ll break my ribs!”

[Illustration]

His answer was to clench his two fists together and bring them down on
the back of my neck. The shock was terrific. My forehead hit the roadway
so hard that for a moment I felt that the Space Era had truly dawned and
that I was in amongst the thickest star-splashes! Then it came again and
again. I writhed and groaned, trying to beg him to let me get up. I was
willing to surrender to him or anybody just then, I must admit.

But the only reply I got was an animal grunt each time he slammed that
human hammer down on my defenceless neck. I knew that if he did it
again, I would be knocked right out, or blinded. With more strength that
I knew I had, I twisted over, upsetting his balance just a little. I saw
him above me, his face distorted.

Then that face disappeared sideways to my right and my chest was free of
his great weight.

Pedro Moreno gazed down at me, grave and sallow-faced in the distant
lamp-light.

“You certainly do pick yourself some spots of trouble, amigo,” he said.
He rubbed his own knuckles and I saw that they were grazed. Giacomo was
on his knees now, trying to get up on to his feet and falling back
again, groaning.

Pedro must have hit him such a blow as won me the Amateur Light
Heavy-weight Championship, I thought.

“Not bad for a bull-fighter,” I said, sitting up and trying to grin, but
suddenly feeling very sick.

But Pedro was not smiling. “I don’t know why I should help you,” he
said. “You asked for everything. A man who does what you did to-night
deserves the full treatment. You’ve ruined our hopes in this place now.
You’ve set back our programme more than you or anyone knows. The game is
up as far as Porchester is concerned.”

Now I was able to grin, in spite of myself. “Then it has been worth it,
every bit of it,” I said.

Pedro dragged me to my feet. “It’s only just begun, amigo,” he said
grimly. “There will be more to come later, my friend.”

He glanced up and down the street and I sensed that he was wondering
what to do with me. Then the silver nose of Hawke’s black Jaguar poked
round the corner gently, oh very gently. He had come down the narrow
street so quietly that, in the pounding of my heart, I had not heard
that purring engine.

And Giacomo was on his feet, shambling towards the car, pointing back
and trying to say what had happened. He seemed terrified of John Hawke,
judging by the tone of his thick voice.

Pedro gave a strange sigh and grasped me by the arm. “Come on, my
friend,” he said slowly. “When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go.” For
a moment, I even thought he was my friend.

Hawke flung open the door at the front of the car. I got inside. He did
not even look at me. Pedro slung my coat across my shoulders and sat
down beside Giacomo in the rear seat.

The car turned round the block and so back to the well-lit main streets.
Then it headed towards the outskirts of Porchester.

There was complete silence in the car. This is what it must be like as
one walks to meet a firing squad, I thought. Or in that strange still
moment before one’s plane hits the ground . . .

I put my throbbing head in my hands and waited, unable to think, even to
feel fear, any longer.

Then, behind me, a hand felt into my jacket pocket and I heard the crisp
sound of the envelope as it was withdrawn.

And I knew that I had been a failure—to my country, to Dr. Phipps, to
the grey-haired policeman at Beltenham Research Station, shot in the
execution of his duty.

But, most of all, a failure to myself. I could have wept as this
realization swept over me, relentlessly as an ocean wave.


                               _Sixteen_
                            Surprise Return

The rain had started again. Now the windscreen-wipers set up a solemn
whirring undertone to this grim night. We passed along a main street,
cobble-stoned and shining, and then bumped over a narrow level-crossing.
I could see various isolated lights, set at differing levels, here and
there. Two red lamps winked down at me, almost malevolently, as we
reached the other side of the railway lines. A shunting-engine chuffed
up and down in the distance, its couplings clanking.

Here and there, solitary walkers, with umbrellas or dressed in gleaming
mackintoshes, made their way, head down, towards some obscure sheltering
place. It was not much later than eight o’clock, yet the streets were
almost deserted.

Then we swung into a curving street, whose dark terraced houses gave on
to the great goods yard of the railway. I caught a glimpse of the street
sign as we passed: “Shelley Crescent,” it said. Earlier I had seen a
small decrepit street marked, “Keats Avenue”. Poor Shelley! Poor Keats!
But perhaps more to the point, poor inhabitants of these sad and dreary
warrens. . . .

Then the Jaguar stopped. “Number forty-seven, isn’t it?” Hawke asked.
Pedro said, “Yes, that’s the number _he_ said.”

They bundled me out of the car. I saw that we had stopped before a
narrow house with a small bay-window and a hall door decorated with
coloured glass. Two of the panes were broken and had been replaced
roughly with squares of ragged cardboard.

Before the window, tired privet bushes abandoned the fight to give an
air of privacy to a small square of dried grass, in the centre of which
a minute flower bed provided sustenance for one bedraggled rose and a
score of assorted weeds.

Pedro carefully pushed open the hall door. In the passage-way a naked
gas-jet burned low.

“Upstairs,” said Giacomo, giving me a hard punch in the small of the
back. The stairs were steep and narrow, and covered with old linoleum.
My foot slipped once and I almost fell. Giacomo was not taking any
chances this time. He punched me again as I fell. I gasped and staggered
on.

John Hawke said with a vicious quietness, “Not now, my friend. There
will be time! Patience, patience.”

I was leading the way, for Pedro had left the procession to knock on a
brown-varnished door at the end of the hall-way. I heard him say, “All
right, we’ve come. Put some coffee outside the door. Hurry, _pronto_!”

Then I heard a girl’s adenoidal voice say, “Okey-doke, Mr. Jackson. I’ll
see to it straight away. The kettle’s on. We’ve been waiting for you.”

I heard his feet ascending the stairs behind us, then I came to a
flaking green door.

Giacomo said, “In there,” and pushed the door open before me.

The room was what is known as a bed-sitter—that is, a narrow iron
bedstead stood under the window, and a small table and three wooden
chairs crouched by the tiny fireplace. There was a strip of coarse brown
matting across the boards of the floor, and a shiny colour reproduction
of a famous Victorian painting on the wall. It showed a Puritan sneering
at two kitchen wenches as they stood laughing back at him, their red
hands on their buxom hips. A stained cream paper blind flapped raggedly
before the window. Outside, the shunting engine kept up its monotonous
reiteration.

John Hawke looked round the room and sniffed with disgust.

“It is an appropriate place for such a man to live,” he said, with
contempt. Then he turned away, his white handkerchief to his nose.

Giacomo shrugged. “One room is as good as any other to kill a man in,”
he said. “I have known worse—much worse. You should live in Budapest,
Boss—then you would know these things!”

John Hawke turned to him and said, “Lie on the bed, Jacko amigo. You are
tired. This Englishman has exhausted you.”

The Corsican glared at me and then slouched over to the bed. I heard a
tin tray being put outside the door. Pedro waited a moment and then
strode across the room. He came back with a coffee-pot and three cups.

“No saucers, amigo,” he said to Hawke.

“Jacko will find it hard to drink out of a cup,” said Hawke, pulling up
a ricketty chair and sitting down. He glanced across at the bed, but
Giacomo had his eyes shut and did not seem to be listening.

Pedro set the cups on the table and began to pour out the coffee,
offering the first cup to Hawke.

He looked at it for a moment and then pushed it aside. “I am not
thirsty,” he said, “I could not drink that. It is an affront to the
stomach, bull-fighter.”

Pedro placed the cup before me. After my fight, I was not so fastidious.
As I sipped, I thought how well their plan had been laid. This was
obviously no regular stopping-place, but a temporary pied-à-terre. The
girl below had called Pedro “Mr. Jackson”, so she could not know much
about him. Moreover, she had brought three cups upstairs, under the
impression that only three men had entered the house. I saw from the
litter about the fireplace that the room was not often cleaned, and
that, in itself, sent a shiver down my back. A body could lie in this
room for days, perhaps weeks, before anyone came in and discovered
it. . . . Perhaps on that bed, where Giacomo now grunted like a
pig. . . . Perhaps under the bed, who knows?

Pedro leaned on the small marble mantelpiece, waiting, his cup in his
hand. Hawke rested his long chin on his knuckles and gazed at me
steadily, frighteningly now.

“Sit down,” he said. “I want a word with you.”

Wearily, I did as he ordered, and waited for him to speak. When he did
at last his voice was different from the one I had heard at any time
before.

“You know, my friend,” he said, “I am disappointed in you. No, don’t
misunderstand me, this is no fatherly lecture because the boy’s school
report is not up to standard. This is _something different_, you
understand.”

I drank the miserable coffee and gazed back at him as calmly as I could,
though my heart was now beating so fast that I thought it must show some
evidence in my throat.

Hawke said, “I was suspicious of you from the first, you know. I never
did believe in you, my friend. That was why I kept you with us, so as to
know just what you were up to. But then I sensed in you some quality
which was tolerable to me, some affinity, in a way. And, I must admit,
you looked like being useful, at Porchester.”

I broke in, “I am not a traitor, John Hawke!”

He waved his hand gently. “Who knows what you are? Please let me finish.
I might have trained you in time to see things the realistic way. But I
see now that you are an incurable romantic, in the way you British so
often are, without even knowing it. You let your heart control your
head, you know, and that is bad, for heart is a stupid creature—only
head has sense.”

He paused and began to beat out a little rhythm on the dirty table top.
Then he looked up and said, “To-night, in that Milk Bar, you lost
control, didn’t you? After all I had done to bring this affair to a
satisfactory conclusion, you lost control, and blew the whole thing sky
high, my friend!”

I said a little stupidly, “I am glad I upset your plans, Hawke. I would
do it again, if I could.”

He looked through me and said simply, “I am not of your world, amigo. I
do those things which seem right in my own world. Can you not see that I
am perhaps sufficiently intelligent to believe in what I do?”

He shrugged his fine shoulders and said, “I am wasting my time with you.
You might have come with me. Now I must dispose of you. You had your
chance. That is all.”

Pedro said quietly from behind me. “Any man can make a mistake, when his
mind is unbalanced, amigo. This fellow could still be useful to us, if
he agreed to toe the line. The cards are on the table now; we know who
everyone is. It would be easier to train him. He is good material,
Master. He will improve now that he knows what we want.”

John Hawke looked at Pedro, who returned his stare unwaveringly.

“You seem to have taken him under your wing, my friend,” he said softly.
“He has become quite a favourite with you, hasn’t he?”

Pedro’s wry face twisted into such a smile as I would not have cared to
see, had I been facing him in enmity.

“I have looked death in the eye so often, _hombre_,” he said, “that I
have come to know his features as well as I know yours.” I noticed Hawk
wince a little when Pedro used the familiar and almost contemptuous
term, “hombre”. But Pedro went on, relentlessly, “And I have looked men
in the eye so often, _hombre_, that I know when I have met a true one.”

He flung out his arm towards me. “This young fellow is brave. He may be
a fool, but he is brave, grant him that, at least, and be patient with
him. Try to train that foolishness out of him so that you may use his
bravery for your own advantage. That makes good sense, does it
not—_hombre_?”

His dark and sardonic expression was such that for an instant, even John
Hawke seemed small before it. But only for an instant; then he seemed to
breathe in and become magnificent once more. He smiled and lowered his
grey eyes.

“You might have made a good lawyer, Pedrito mio,” he said, “if the bulls
hadn’t claimed you! But there, a man moves along strange paths in his
lifetime. He comes to death in his own perverse way, whatever his good
sense may have advised him earlier!”

He rose and walked gravely across the room, his hands behind him. I felt
that it was my turn to speak now.

“Don’t put yourself out, Hawke, considering this problem any longer,” I
said. “I’m grateful to Pedro, but I’d rather die than join up with your
sort. I’ll never see you as anything but a traitor, a murderous
mountebank. The sort of man who gassed Jews and gipsies in German prison
camps, who shot up women and children in Poland, who got your practise
in bombing Guernica!”

As I said the last words, John Hawke came forward like a savage and
struck me full across the face, knocking me over into my chair.

I was afraid that for a moment he would strangle me as I lay. But he
stopped and stood away from me, glaring.

“My own brother was killed at Guernica,” he gasped. “I have reason to
remember it too, you fool.”

Pedro helped me up and his face was grim to see. “My father and sisters
died there,” he said, tight-lipped, “but I do not go about the world
weeping.”

For a moment the smouldering fires of his eyes met that of Hawke; they
stood like two great stags, their antlers locked until death should part
them.

I do not know how the situation might have gone then, for the air was
heavy with tension. Then the door opened without warning, and Joey stood
framed in the doorway, his soft hat on the back of his head, a cigarette
in his mouth. He was smiling, like a man in complete charge of the
situation. Joey the razor-man from Birmingham, my dear friend—who had
tried to kill me in that little green Morris! In my relief, I ran
towards him. “Thank God you have come, Joey!” I said.

He stared through me and then spat. “Are you having trouble with this
kid, Pedro?” he asked, easily, looking past me coldly.

I gazed at him in amazement. Then light dawned.

“Why, you double-crossing rat!” I said.

Joey struck me across the mouth with the back of his thin hand. Giacomo
was behind me, pinning back my arms. I could not retaliate.


                              _Seventeen_
                        Invitation to a Journey

Then Joey came forward into the room, his hands in his raincoat pockets.
He stopped by the table and looked round, but easily, as though he knew
this room well.

“A bit of a dump,” he said, “but it suits my purpose when I’m this way
on a job. On my pay, you can’t afford soft lights and sweet music in
every town.”

He looked sharply across the table at Hawke, who drew out a notecase and
flung a tight wad of notes on the table. Joey swept them up and put them
into his jacket pocket with a grin and a mock bow. There was a certain
light contempt in all his actions, I noticed now.

“Thanks, chum,” he said. “That’ll keep the old wolf from the door for a
few more weeks.”

Surprisingly, Pedro said bitterly, “Mind that the wolf doesn’t find a
way down your chimney one day, my friend!”

Joey turned to him and said easily, “In my trade, that is always a
possibility. That’s why the fees are so high—I’ve got to protect
myself, mate. But it won’t be long now and then I’ll be on that boat to
Australia! That’ll be a relief, I can tell you! How do you think I’ll
look as a newly-fledged emigrant, Frankland?”

I said, “You look better as a fully-feathered double-crosser, you
stinker!”

He wagged a finger at me. “Naughty, naughty,” he laughed. “Little boys
trussed-up like chickens shouldn’t say such wicked things. It offends
their dear friends and then it makes them get hurt, like this, for
instance!”

As he leaned forward to put his lighted cigarette end on to my cheek, I
slipped from Giacomo’s grasp and punched him twice on the jaw; once to
give him the feel of it, and the second time as he fell backwards. I
gloried in those punches! Then his head struck against the marble
fireplace and his hat fell over his eyes. He lay very still.

And Hawke said, “You fool! And you could have been doing that for
me—and not against me!”

I saw that Pedro stood, barring the door, a strange smile on his face.

Then, as I gasped with my recent effort, Giacomo took my arms again.
Joey struggled to his feet, rubbing his jaw and looking bewildered.

Hawke said to him, “Have you got a car outside?”

Joey nodded: “But I don’t feel like driving,” he said.

John Hawke nodded to Pedro: “You take Joey,” he said. “This one can
travel with Jacko and myself.”

Pedro shrugged his shoulders and lit a cigarette slowly. Now I observed
that his hand was shaking. What had happened in that room to-night had
worried him—though I could not think why.

Then, smiling, John Hawke turned to me and said, “Come, my friend, it is
time that we went for a drive into the night, you and I.”

I dared to say, “Where are you going then?”

He said airily, “Why, _we_ are going to Cardiff, to catch a little boat
called the _Nautilus_. But, have no qualms, my friend, you will not be
there!”


                               _Eighteen_
                         Salvation and a Doctor

So we left Porchester, Pedro and Joey in that same little green Morris,
Hawke and Giacomo with me in the Jaguar. Five men going out—only four
coming back, it seemed.

The road flicked underneath our wheels, and soon the houses gave place
to hedgerows. I leaned forward and covered my face with my hands, trying
to think. . . . Giacomo was sitting beside me. He took a handful of my
hair and dragged my head upright again.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

I said, “There’s no law to stop a man from thinking, is there, ape-man?”

He grunted and pushed me sideways. I lay where he had flung me, too
tired to move. And there I remembered an occasion in Korea when we did a
parachute jump on to what had been described by our Intelligence types
as “good hard terrain”. It turned out to be quite the reverse.

Sixteen of us landed in a paddy-field, and the stinking slush was up to
our thighs before we could disentangle ourselves from our harness. It
had been a hopeless affair, our submachine-guns had fallen in the stuff,
and were irretrievable. We had to flounder out of the middle of that
morass without delay. There was not even time to bury or hide our
parachutes.

I remember a young Corporal saying grimly to me, “Well, for the last six
months, Sarg, you’ve been knocking blazes out of us, making us go
through the drill about preserving weapons, burying parachutes, etc.,
etc., etc., and now when it comes to the first push, we don’t do any of
it!”

He was a young Londoner, with a quick turn of wit, and bright red hair.
I liked him even when he was pulling my leg—which was almost always.

Then, as he finished speaking and looked round for support from the
other men, a burst of fire came from behind a ragged clump of trees and
he fell into that mud, still smiling.

Miraculously, a few of us were left after that terrible burst. We
floundered on, to what looked like solid ground, always afraid that
another burst would come from the trees. But it didn’t and we got there,
into a ditch, where we lay gasping and helpless for a while, as though
we had struggled through the Valley of the Shadow—nothing less.

Shortly, we realized why there had been no more machine-gun fire, when a
formation of U.S.A.F. fighters swept over. They had scared away the
gunners. They kept up their strafing swoops until we were picked up.
Sixteen had jumped; four got back to Base.

And in that purring black Jaguar, leaning against the cold window, I
recalled that incident, recalled that even when things look their worst,
there may still be a large-sized hope just waiting to be grasped, just
as we had grasped it once in that stinking paddy-field.

And then we were coming to a village—a little grey stone Cotswold
place, a few handkerchief-sized windows with geraniums in them, and
whitewashed fences. Perhaps the stray cat walking through the headlights
on his way home, his eyes gleaming green and malevolent.

And here I staged my last “hope”!

“Let me get out,” I growled, holding my hand over my mouth. “I feel
awfully sick. Let me get out! Out!”

Jacko grinned but did nothing; Hawke was a fastidious man—it would not
have suited him for me to put my threat into action. The immaculate
Jaguar slid smoothly to the roadside and he jumped out to wait for me,
to make sure.

But stumbling out of the car, I judged where he was and swung that door
as hard as I could into his body, and then I set off running,
zig-zagging wildly, like a rabbit on the stubble of a harvest-field,
expecting the shot in the back at every step.

An old lady with a woollen shawl was standing by her gate, waiting for
her cat to come home. She saw me race, bent-backed, past her gentle gate
and almost fell over, clasping her hands to her chest. “Oh my!” she
said, as I ran past. I wish I could have consoled her at that moment.

Then the narrow street curved down a little slope. I took the turn, and
to my utter disbelief, I saw a lighted house, with a lamp outside its
gates, on which the magic words “Police Station” were illuminated.

It was a new red-brick building, quite out of keeping with the rest of
that quaint place, but I was no architectural purist just then. It was
as beautiful as Blenheim Palace, as rich as Solomon’s temple, to me
then.

I staggered through the white wicket-gate and over the green lawn, and
up the two new concrete steps. I was in an austere but refreshing
white-painted room. A police sergeant stared at me from behind a
blanket-covered table, where he had been writing laboriously with a
steel-nibbed pen.

“Hey, now,” he said, “what’s all this about?”

I was sprawling on the drugget matting then, smiling and safe, but still
sprawling.

The sergeant bent over me and said, “You drunk, sir, by any chance?”

I shook my head violently, trying to get back my breath. “Lock me up,
Sergeant,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything later. It’s a matter of
national concern. Atomic secrets and all that.”

I tried to make it sound real—but even as I spoke, I realized how plain
daft it sounded.

The sergeant was patting me on the shoulder.

“Now, look here,” he said, “you go on home quietly and we’ll forget all
about it. And to-morrow, you make a decision never to be so silly again.
All right, sir?”

I said, “No, it’s not all right. I want protection, Sergeant. If you
don’t give it to me, then I’m sunk. Four spies are on my heels and if
you let them take me, they will kill me, I swear, Sergeant.”

He was still gazing down at me, scratching his ear with his penholder,
when footsteps sounded on the gravel outside the place.

John Hawke came into the room, smiling quietly, wearing his dark suit,
carrying his brief-case, straightening his grey silk tie.

“Good evening, Sergeant,” he said pleasantly. “You have been put to no
trouble, I hope?”

The policeman stared at him and then smiled.

“Not really, sir,” he said, “but I am a bit worried about this gent,
like. He says such funny things, as you might say.”

Hawke waved his white hand, “I shouldn’t think of saying them,” he said.
“I know the sort of thing he says. No, I shouldn’t dream of saying
them—not even in a nightmare, Sergeant.”

The policeman looked at me with a frown. “Is he a bit er. . . ?” he
said, tapping his forehead.

Hawke said lightly, “Now, Sergeant, no insinuations, please. This
gentleman is a patient of mine, but I will not have him maligned.”

I had got up and was leaning on that blanket-covered table, my breath
coming back to me now.

I cut across his words and said, “Look Sergeant, if you let these thugs
take me away, you will be making a big mistake.”

Hawke said to the astonished policeman, “You see, he always speaks of
many men being on his trail. Whereas there is only myself and the male
nurse.”

As he spoke I saw Jacko standing outside the door, waiting—Jacko, the
perfect male nurse, his hands folded before him, a beatific smile on his
swarthy face, his eyelids lowered.

“They are spies, I tell you!” I said. “They killed a man at Beltenham
last night.”

I had expected the policeman to jump forward then and arrest Hawke. But
all he did was to stare at me as though I had crept from under a flat
stone. I could see that I had shocked him, in a way that did me no
credit in his mind.

“That policeman was an old mate of mine,” he said. “I don’t like hearing
him talked about by drunken fellows who should be home and in their
beds.”

He took a decisive step towards me, hands outstretched. “Come on, sir,”
he said. “Get moving with this gentleman, like, or I shall have to be
annoyed with you.”

I said, “Why, you stupid ape—you are playing into their hands. Well, if
you won’t help me, I’ll have to help myself.”

I turned round to John Hawke, who still smiled, and said, “If you lay a
hand on me, Hawke, I’ll do something I should have done in
Stratford—knock your treacherous head off.”

He said, quite calmly, “Now Mr. Ferguson, you know you _always_ say
that, and then you regret it the next day. Now come on home, sir, gently
does it.”

He stepped towards me, and smiled at the policeman as he did so. “You
may think you have a hard job, Sergeant,” he said sweetly, “but a doctor
could tell you things, believe me!”

“I bet, sir,” said the policeman, smiling. Then as I moved towards
Hawke, he took me from behind, pinning my arms by my side. I was
powerless.

“I’ll lend you a pair of handcuffs, sir,” he said, “until you get him
home.”

Hawke smiled serenely and said, “Thank you Sergeant, but that will not
be necessary. We deplore violence.” He waved to Giacomo who shambled
forward into the room. “My male nurse, Mr. Whitchurch, is an expert in
these matters. He understands Mr. Ferguson as no one else does. In his
more lucid moments, dear Mr. Ferguson adores him—but not now, of
course, you understand, not while the fit is on him.”

The sergeant nodded. “I understand perfectly, sir,” he said.

I was speechless now. The stupid well-meaning fool had given me back to
them and there was nothing I could do. Jacko had such a grip on my arm
that if I had tried to break away, it would have had to be with a
fractured arm.

We went down the two concrete steps, across the green lawn. Hawke stayed
behind a moment with the sergeant, offering him something for his
kindness.

I heard the sergeant say, “No, sir, certainly not. I was only doing my
duty, and that is a reward in itself.”

Then they got me back to the black Jaguar, and in the darkness they
tried to make me understand how angry they were. Giacomo held me, while
Hawke practised a few right cross-counters, from very close quarters. He
couldn’t miss at that range.

I remember saying to him, “Right, boy, just step outside with me—I
swear I will not run away this time—and I’ll show you just how to do
it. I challenge you, John Hawke!”

But Jacko did not let me go, and I tumbled down into the limbo of
unconsciousness still shouting, “I challenge you, John Hawke!” My cries
echoed in my inner ear like the mouthings of a madman, along the endless
corridors of time. Then I knew no more.


                               _Nineteen_
                           The Lighted Window

Now the road sped towards us again, white in our strong beam. I was
being taken for a final ride, and I knew it. Moreover, I didn’t seem to
care. I was apathetic, punch-drunk and apathetic, now. In his fury, John
Hawke had worked on me pretty thoroughly. I felt disinclined even to
help myself. I slumped down to sleep away what was left of my life after
Giacomo let me go again. The rain had stopped now, and as we got out
into the open country, the moon rose white and round, shedding its light
on trees and hedgerows. It was so peaceful. . . . With the hum of the
great engine in my ears, I dozed off, dazed, finished.

In the past, when I have read adventure stories, I have always been
extremely sceptical about the hero’s capacity for going to sleep even in
the most difficult and painful situations. Nonsense, I used to say; no
man could possibly fall asleep like that.

But in that purring car, I found that they could. It was, indeed,
extremely easy to do. All that was needed was almost complete physical
exhaustion and a quite complete lack of interest in one’s future; the
two went hand in hand with me that night.

But I also found something else—that in moments of stress, the body and
mind recuperate very quickly, given the slightest amount of rest.

So, suddenly, I found myself awake again and in full possession of my
faculties. The weariness and pain had fallen from me, and, what was more
important, my mood of deep depression had gone. I no longer felt
fatalistically willing to accept death.

I opened my eyes and realized that the engine of the car was not
running. I looked round cautiously to find that I was alone in the
Jaguar. My next reaction was to feel for the ignition key—but there I
was disappointed, for it was not there. My hopes fell slightly as I
tried the catch of my own door and that of the driver’s side, to find
both locked.

Very carefully, and keeping my head down, I felt over the back seat; the
door on the near side was fastened, but the other, the one giving on to
the open road, was not!

I sat back again and listened. Voices sounded in the darkness from
behind the Jaguar and the dimmed lights of a car shone through the back
window on to me. I raised my head and saw, through the rear window, that
the small Morris was parked by the grass verge, perhaps forty yards from
the car I was in, and that men were bending over the engine, shining a
torch into it as though seeking the cause for some engine failure.

Then it came back to me. Joey had obviously had some trouble and had
hooted for Hawke’s car to stop and give a hand. Hawke and Giacomo had
left me, dead to the world, as they thought, having locked the doors.
But one door had been left unlocked by sheer chance, it appeared. And
now I was determined to use that stroke of luck to the full.

I wished, all the same, that it had been the other door, the one near
the verge, for I did not relish that dash across a fully-lit open road,
into the shadows on the far side.

My only hope was that the men would be so occupied in staring into the
engine of the Morris that they would not notice me.

I looked out of the front window first of all, to get some sort of
bearings. We were in the depths of the country, it seemed to me, with
only hedgerows and fields to be seen. Then, over the road, to my right,
I observed the silhouette of a tall spinney, black against the indigo
sky. It must be about a hundred yards away, I guessed, and to get to it
I had to cross a narrow field, in which corn was stooked in long rows.
Between me and that field was a hedge, not a very high one—but a hedge,
all the same!

And between me and that hedge was a stretch of lighted road. . . . But
it was a chance too fortunate to ignore. I bent down in the car and took
off my shoes. There was no time to tie their laces and hang them about
my neck, or to do anything very efficient like that; I merely dropped
them on to the floor of the car and then slid over the seat, trying to
make myself as flat as I could! I have seen cats do this, when they are
hunting; I did the same thing myself, now, but I was the hunted one!

Once, when I was half-way over the dividing seat, I heard John Hawke’s
voice, clear through the darkness. He said, “I think there is one in my
tool-kit. Jacko, go and see!”

My heart stood still, and I fell down on to the rear seat and pretended
once more to be asleep. But just then I heard Pedro call out, “Okay,
Jacko! Don’t bother—I’ve got one here.”

I pictured Giacomo turning, cursing Pedro, and then shuffling back to
the group bent over the Morris. I must take advantage of Jacko’s turned
back, and the sudden renewed interest that the others must be taking now
that they had found what had been lost.

I eased the catch of the rear door gently, opening it gradually, inch by
inch. Light seemed to flood into the car! I almost shut the door again,
in my sudden panic. But somehow I controlled myself, and continued my
snail-slow movement until the door was open almost eighteen inches.
Still no one shouted, no footsteps came racing down the road towards me,
no shots were fired!

For a horrible second, I imagined that they had seen the door opening
and were observing it quietly, waiting to see what else I would do
before they pounced. Then that fear passed and a coldness I had scarcely
ever known before swept over me.

I eased myself on to the road, let the door slowly fall back and,
pressing myself against the body of the car, worked my way to the front,
then quickly ducked behind the bonnet. There for a little while I felt
secure, out of their sight, able to breathe again.

In that moment of respite, I formulated my plan of action. I would run
forward down the road, trying to keep the Jaguar between myself and my
enemies. Then, when I was quite out of reach of the headlights, I would
strike across the road towards the spinney.

Such was my sudden enthusiasm for this plan that I was almost over the
hedge before I realized what a fool I was!

With a freezing heart, I stood stock still. Obviously, when they came
from the Morris and found that I had gone, they would look at the door
by which I had made my exit and then they would look towards the
spinney, my obvious goal. Thereafter, it would merely be a matter of
searching behind each stook, behind each tree, in every bush—and they
would find me, sore-footed without my shoes, and ready to give in
without a fight, no doubt.

I scooted back across that road like a frightened rabbit, scrambled
across a deep ditch at the bottom of which the water gurgled, and over a
barbed-wire fence. I lay down for a while then, and heard their voices,
perhaps three hundred yards away. They sounded excited in the darkness.

Suddenly the foremost car’s headlamps were switched on at full boost.
The bright light flashed down the road and I was almost caught in its
glare. I flung myself down, behind a clump of nettles and hoped for the
best.

Then as soon as I heard heavy bodies bursting through the hedge into the
corn field, I went on all fours out of the glow, over a little rise, and
began to run downhill like a madman.

I fell many times, and banged my unprotected toes on stones and pieces
of flint. The ground below me was hard and tussocky, not good farming
land. I stumbled from lump to lump, over sudden ditches and murderous
gorse-bushes, until at last I thought my feet would surely give out.

Then below me, half a mile away, I guessed, I saw a light, a small light
such as might come from a window.

There were many fences and ditches between me and that light, I felt
sure; but at that moment it was the only thing I wanted to achieve. I
ran on and on towards it, my heart leaping as though it would burst
through my chest, my throat so restricted that I could hardly suck in
the clean cold Cotswold air that I so much needed to keep me alive, in
every sense of the word!


                                _Twenty_
                                  Sam

How long I ran, I do not know. Perhaps there is no clock capable of
measuring such a headlong and painful flight. How far I ran is another
matter; in all reason, it could not have been more than half a mile in
all. Yet half a mile over uneven and dangerous country, at night, is no
matter for joking; especially after such a punishing; especially with
such enemies as I had behind me, somewhere in the darkness.

But at last I staggered among the stones, up a small rise, and at the
top, overbowered by hawthorn and elder trees, I saw a small cottage. To
be more accurate, perhaps, I should describe it as a hovel, for it was
little more than a box of dry-stone walling with a flat roof of
corrugated iron, and an unglazed window-hole. It was through this hole
that the dim and reddish-orange light of an oil-lamp had shone at me
when I had left the road, bringing new hope to me and drawing me on over
the harsh valley and up the stone-littered hillside.

As I approached the place, I realized that behind it lay a biggish
walled enclosure, from which came the cracked and mournful noises that
sheep make. This then would be the shepherd’s hut, this hovel towards
which I crept.

As noiselessly as I could, I stretched up and looked through the window.
The scene which met my eyes might have been a painting from Victorian
times, framed as it was by the stone oblong of the aperture; a painting
of simple and impoverished country life. No doubt it would have been
given such a title as “Dreaming of the Happy Days gone by”; or,
“Memories”.

A white haired old man sat in a rocking chair, gazing into a wood-fire
which burned in a crude and open stone fireplace. His face and neck were
burned brown by the summer’s sun. He wore a tarpaulin jacket and red
neckerchief and his legs below the knee were wrapped round with sacking.

Beside him, on a tattered hearthrug, a big sheepdog bitch lay curled
with a litter of small puppies. The old man’s left hand rested on the
bitch’s head, almost as though he had gone to sleep while caressing her.

Before him, on the flat stone mantel, stood a rusty tin alarm clock,
whose tick came strongly to my ears as I gazed in through the window.
And above the clock hung a glistening and over-coloured portrait of King
Edward VII, splendid in a red tunic and Field-Marshal’s feathers.

On a blanket-covered card-table behind the rocking chair stood a bottle
and a blue tin mug. A half-finished loaf and a piece of cheese completed
the tableau, leaning against each other on a newspaper.

The frugal meal was the spur which drove me on to disturb the old man,
for suddenly I felt terribly hungry, and then I recalled that I had not
eaten for six hours or more, and I had used up a great deal of energy,
fighting and being fought and running!

I walked up to the rough plank door and knocked. The sheepdog bitch
growled protectively and then the old man’s voice said, “Come in!”

I pushed open the door and entered. The bitch rose, rolling her puppies
aside with the movement, and came forward menacingly to sniff my legs.

The old man half-turned and gazed at me with pale-blue eyes, the eyes of
old age. Then he smiled, “She’ll not hurt yer, mister,” he said.

I patted the bitch and she turned, wagging her tail, and went back to
the black and white puppies which were now staring about them in a
frightened way, and whining.

The old man started to get up but I stopped him, saying, “I’m very sorry
to bother you, but as a matter of fact I’ve lost my way.”

He surveyed me from head to foot and said wryly, “Aye, ’tis a longish
way from Birmingham, mister.” He saw my surprise and added, “Oh, I could
tell where yer come from, as soon as I heard yer talk, then. Used to go
there a lot, times gone by, in the pony and trap, when I worked for the
old master at Blackrigg Farm. But he’s been dead an’ gone many years
now—just after the 1914 War started. Lost a son then, he did, and never
looked up again. I haven’t been to Birmingham since then. But you’ve
hurt your face, mister.”

I told him that I was on a walking tour and had got rather off my track.
I said I’d run into a tree in the darkness and made a mess of my face.
He dropped his chin and whistled.

“Do you reckon to walk without boots, mister?” he said, at last, looking
down at my tattered socks.

I tried to make light of it and said, “No! But a funny thing happened. I
got a blister a bit earlier on and about an hour ago I climbed down to
dangle my feet in a ditch. Like a fool, I put my shoes on the edge and
as I scrambled back, they fell in. Sank right away and I couldn’t find
them in the mud!”

He scratched the side of his nose and screwed up his mouth. “That was a
careless thing,” he said. “Good shoes cost money, and money ain’t easy
to come by these days. Where did you say the ditch was?” He began to
rise. “I’ll get the lantern and come to look for them with yer. Mayhap
we can rake ’em out wi’ my crook.”

I said, “Please don’t bother. I’ve been walking hard for an hour since
then. We’d never find that ditch again.”

He sat down and stared me in the face. “I know all the ditches for an
hour’s walk from here,” he said. “On both sides of the Monmouth Road.
There’s Grimsdyke, Dumbledyke, Frogdyke—all over the hill, here, and
coming t’other way there’s . . .”

I suddenly felt weak and sat down in a heap by the sheepdog bitch, who
ignored me and went on suckling her pups.

The old man’s face clouded. “Hey,” he said, “you’re fair done in, lad!
You’ve been on this walking caper too long, I thinks.”

He poured something from the bottle into the blue tin mug. I observed
that his hand was shaking, for the neck of the bottle clinked against
the enamel cup. I observed also that he poured with his left hand and
that his right sleeve hung empty by his side. I took the mug he offered
and drank. The light amber stuff sent a glow down into my chest and for
a moment set me coughing.

After that I felt better. He smiled and said, “That’ll make a new man of
yer, lad! Right old parsnip, it is; nigh on five year old. Mrs. Fallows
sends me a bottle up here every week to keep the cold out. She’s a good
soul, is Mrs. Fallows. Best farmer’s wife I know. And he’s the best I’ve
worked for, for many a year, since old master died what I was tellin’
you about.”

I said, “Do you think you could spare me a bite of bread and cheese? I’d
be most willing to pay for it.”

He looked at me sternly and said, “If you talk about paying here, me
lad, out you’ll go, neck and crop, shoes or no! Bumps on the face
neither!”

I smiled and said I was sorry. Then he cut me off a slice of bread and
put a thick slice of cheese on it.

I said, “You’re very kind.”

He sat down again as I ate. “Fiddle faddle,” he grunted. “Have you ever
been a soldier?”

Then time stood still. I told him that I had, that I had once even
reached the dizzy heights of Sergeant-Major!

He slapped his leg with his left hand and chuckled. “Well, old soldiers
should stick together,” he said. “But I never thought I’d live to feed a
Sergeant-Major, no, that I never!”

He gazed at the picture of Edward VII for a moment and said, “I was
soldiering long afore _his_ time. I doubt he was no but a young chap
when I put on the red and went to Africa.”

I said, “You lost your arm there?”

He nodded, smiling and flicking the empty sleeve. “Aye, lad, I left that
’un in Africa. Them black men took it off me, in a way. Terrible
fellows, them were. But it was all a mistake, as you might say. We
weren’t meant to be fightin’ them at the time. . . .”

As I listened to the old man’s rustic voice bumbling on in that little
stone room, I forgot my tiredness; forgot Hawke and Pedro and Jacko and
that double-crosser Joey. I went back into another century, relaxed with
sheer exhaustion. . . . The old man’s story was a simple one, but it had
the ring of authority; it was his great moment, I think, the focus of
his whole life. Nothing that had happened since ranked very high in his
memory compared to that day he spoke of, that grim and sunlit day when
he, and a company of other young rustics called to the Colours, marched
over a kopje to clear out some Boer irregulars, and found that they had
walked into a hornet’s nest. As he rambled on, I saw the bare brown
hillside that suddenly confronted them, and the black-skinned tribesmen
sitting on the hillside in the cruel sun, waiting for such an
eventuality.

“Aye, sittin’ on their hams,” he said, “just as though they knew we
would come sooner or later. Laughin’ in the sun, they were, and shoutin’
out to each other. They had spears and knobkerries, no guns. We had
guns, but most of us threw them down when we saw how many them blacks
were. Why, that hillside was covered with them. We’d done no fightin’,
you see, just young lads from the country mostly. We thought we had got
an easy job when we set out to chivvy the Boer chaps, but we hadn’t
bargained for this. . . .”

Then I saw the chieftain in his leopard skin kaross standing and waving
his white stick, and the tribesmen sliding up from their haunches and
coming down the hillside like a black river of death, their harsh voices
echoing up to the waiting vultures in the deadly blue sky.

“They was on us then. We tried to tell ’em we meant no harm to them, but
they didn’t understand. When we saw it was no good runnin’ away, some of
us got together and started hitting back at them with rifle butts. And I
remember our officer, a young chap from Gloucester way, called John
Parrish. Oh I remember that lad as well as anybody I know! His father
had the Manor House over Camden way. Aye, he sat on his white horse and
kept popping off his little pistol in their faces, till three of them
threw their great long spears into him. Then he galloped off, with the
things sticking out of him like a pin cushion. A big Zulu fellow hung on
his horse’s tail laughing like mad, till the young fellow tumbled off.
Then they pulled their spears out and carried him to the king. Him in
the leopard skin. He stopped the fighting then and said some words. I
think he was saying he’d stopped it because our officer was such a brave
’un.”

I saw the small party that was left, ten only, he said, turning and
shambling back to their base, wherever it was.

I said, “And you walked with an arm missing?”

He shook his head. “Nay, lad,” he said. “I had two arms to go back with,
only one of them had a slice out of it from one of them spears I was
tellin’ you of. The surgeon had to take my arm off when we reached camp.
It had got a disease in it from the dirty spear, he said. And I was glad
to lose it, in a way. It had given me beans on the way back.”

Against this quietly told story of violence, Joey and his razor seemed
small beer. Even John Hawke shrank a little in comparison with this fine
old man.

He said, “And I’d go again, if the Queen wanted me, mister. Though I
doubt I’m a bit old now to fight with them big Zulu chaps.”

I stood up and said, “The Queen would rather you looked after the sheep
and the pups. She has all the soldiers she needs—but she hasn’t all the
shepherds.”

He thought that one over for a while, half-suspecting I was teasing him.
Then he nodded and said, “Mayhap you’re right, lad. Aye, mayhap you’re
right.”

I said to him, “What’s your name, sir? Mine is Bill Frankland.”

He looked a bit puzzled and then said, “Why they calls me Sam. Sam
Bowmandale, I used to be. But they calls me Sam, hereabouts.”

I felt that the time had come to lay my cards on the table. “Look, Sam,”
I said. “If you want to serve the Queen, you will help me to-night. Men
who are the Queen’s enemies are looking for me. I don’t know where they
are, but they might strike on this place before they’ve done. Have you
got a gun of any sort?”

Sam looked at me quizzically. “You’re not a Keeper?” he said. “You’re
not one o’ them Government chaps who come for licences?”

I said, “No, I swear it, Sam. I have deceived you, saying I was a
walker, but I swear I am not a Government man.”

He got up from the chair. “I knew yer wasn’t a walker the moment you
said it,” he said. “Yer feet are too soft. I could see that. And them
bumps never came off no tree I know of!”

He bent over a big deal cupboard that was set at the right-hand side of
the fireplace and drew out a twelve-bore sporting gun. Its barrel was
pitted with age and neglect and its stock was bound round with tarry
twine.

“I use this for frightening rooks and things at lambin’ time,” he said,
his eyes twinkling. “And mayhap I get a rabbit or what not when the
moon’s at the full. It keeps the pot boilin’ like.” He placed a box of
cartridges beside the gun on the table.

“What do you want it for?” he asked.

I hoped that my answer would not scare him.

“I want to put a few pellets in the legs of the men who are trying to
get me,” I said. “That is, if they dare come here to-night.”

He smiled broadly as I spoke and slapped his one hand on my shoulder.
“That’s the lad,” he said. “By Jingo, but you must have been a real rare
Sergeant-Major! The Queen must have been right proud of thee, lad!”

I smiled in embarrassment and turned away. Then I gave a gasp of
astonishment. Pedro Moreno was standing silently at the far end of the
room. He had come from behind a long piece of ragged sacking which hung
down the wall, opposite the door.

He was smiling, sallow in the lamp-light. The sacking blew inwards as he
stood there and then I realized that there had been another door, which
I had not noticed, a door which no doubt led into the sheep fold, for
now the sound of bleating had increased in volume.

“You were so busy talking, I thought I would just walk in,” he said.

I snatched up the old gun and pointed it at his chest.

“Stay where you are,” I said.

But Pedro still came on, his hands empty and hanging by his sides.

“Put that thing down,” he said. “Your finger is trembling and it might
go off. It could do you a lot of damage, amigo!”

I was amazed at the man’s courage. I lowered the muzzle of the shotgun,
almost in spite of myself, in respect for this man’s stark courage.

He held out his hand towards me. “I am in this with you, you stupid
fool,” he said. “I would not like to see a man as brave as you get taken
for a ride by them.”

Old Sam gazed at Pedro. “Have a drink, mister,” he said. “You seem a
right good chap to me.”

Pedro smiled at him and said, “Thank you, I will. It may be the last
drink I shall get.”

He held the blue tin mug up as though toasting old Sam, and then drained
off the parsnip wine at a gulp.


                              _Twenty-one_
                                 Siege

Over the hill a fox barked in the moonlight. Nell, the sheepdog bitch,
looked up from her sleeping puppies, her nose twitching, as though she
thought she might pick up the scent of the intruder, even at that
distance.

Old Sam rose to his feet. “I’d better go out there and see what I can
see,” he said. “Lend me the gun for a minute, lad.”

Pedro smiled grimly and said, “Stay where you are, friend. The fox
that’s out there might be running on two legs—then what would happen to
you?”

I said, “How do we know that a fox on two legs has not visited us
already?” I was not yet sure of this strange man.

For a moment, I thought Pedro Moreno would lose his temper. He punched
one hand into the palm of the other in silence before he spoke, and when
he did answer, his voice was menacingly quiet.

“My friend,” he said, “there are some men it is a waste of time to help.
I think that you may be one of them, after all.”

I was nettled at this remark and burst out, “Well, how do I know that
you mean well, that you have not got into this place to trap me, to hold
me here until the others arrive?”

The Spaniard passed a hand over his brow, as though he was too weary to
explain to such a fool what must have been so obvious.

“Frankland,” he said at last, “this is one of the occasions when you
will just have to take a chance on it. Life is a gamble anyway, from
start to finish; you will just have to accept the odds that Fate offers.
You have no alternative in any case. But I will tell you now, and you
may believe me or not as you please, that if they ever get into this
room you will see beyond all doubt that _they_ no longer regard me as a
friend.”

I said, “There has been enmity between Giacomo and yourself for a long
time.”

At first I thought that he was going to tell me to mind my own business.
But he converted his emotion into action and with a violent movement,
dragged the heavy cupboard from its place beside the hearth-stone and
set it fair and square against the door to the sheep-pen, the door by
which he had himself just entered.

Then he turned and looked at me gravely and said, “Giacomo is a
punch-drunk killer. He has _no_ gentle feelings. He is a beast of the
forests, nothing more.”

I said, “John Hawke seems to trust him, in spite of what you say.”

It was a cruel stroke and to this day I am shocked that I should have
said such a thing. If Pedro Moreno had struck me down there and then, I
should have deserved the blow.

Indeed, he drew in his breath in a sharp little hiss and then turned
away from me, as though I had spat in his face. With his broad back to
me he said, “Even a God may choose wrong. Read your Greek legend and you
will see.”

I said no more, but overturned the card-table and dragged it to the side
of the room opposite the fireplace, setting it so that it provided a
shelter from which I could cover the door and the window-hole. Somehow,
Pedro’s last remark, almost blasphemous as it had at first seemed, had
convinced me. I would question him no further, I decided, and if he
double-crossed me, then that was that. Death must come sooner or later,
I thought.

I turned the oil-lamp down and set it in a corner of the little room,
alongside the window, so that it would be out of danger from any missile
that might otherwise throw us into sudden darkness; and then I ran
forward, bent double, and let down the heavy wooden catch that was the
only means of securing the thick plank door.

Old Sam sat watching me, making no attempt to stop me from disarranging
his small home. But when I told him that he must go into the corner,
where the cupboards had been, so that a stray bullet through the
window-hole would not blow him off his chair, his face took on a stern
expression.

“What!” he said. “I’ll not be ordered about in my own house. If there’s
fighting, I mean to be in it, young fellow. Don’t forget it, I was
fightin’ the Queen’s enemies before you were thought of. Before there
were any to think of you, even! If I could stand up to them great
blacks, then I can stand up to any fiddling little pipsqueaks out
there!”

If I had had the dealing with him, I might have pointed out that we were
not speaking of the same Queen—much water had passed under the bridges
of the world since he had stood terrified by the great black men on the
hillside, and he was no longer a young man, no longer a fighter. I
should have said that sort of thing, no doubt, and have ended up by
annoying him so much that he would have insisted on staying where he
was, and have ended that night as a dead man, very probably.

Fortunately, Pedro answered him instead, almost without saying a word.
The wry-faced Spaniard bent quickly and with a single sweep of the arm
took up old Nell’s sleeping puppies and placed them in the shelter of
the hearth-stone, in the space left by the cupboard. Their mother
followed immediately and curled herself round them. Pedro then looked at
old Sam firmly.

“If you sit there, she’ll stay,” he said. “If you don’t she’ll come out
to you and the pups will follow. I want no dead pups on my conscience,
old friend. I’ve had dogs of my own.”

Old Sam looked long at Pedro’s unsmiling face. Then, without a word he
got up and dragged his rocking chair alongside the sheepdog. Only then
did his face relax.

“That’s man’s talk,” he said. “I know a man when I meet one.”

Pedro took up three old kitchen knives from the stone mantel. He thrust
them towards Sam.

“Here, friend,” he said, “get your scythe-stone and bring these down to
a point. Then put an edge on both sides that I could shave with. That’ll
keep you out of mischief.”

The old shepherd looked at him, amazed. “Them’s my best knives,” he
said, plaintively. “I’d spoil ’em.”

Pedro shrugged his shoulders. “If I live after to-night,” he said, “I’ll
buy you a canteen of silver-handled cutlery to remind you of this. Go
on, do as I say.”

As Sam worked, grumbling at his task, Pedro came to me behind the table
and said, “They should be here soon. I slipped away from them when they
had searched the corn field and were going into the spinney. They won’t
stay that side of the road. They won’t miss any chances. I saw this
light when I came back to the cars and I’m sure they would see it too.
So, be ready. Shoot to kill, if you dare. _They_ will have no doubts
about what to do. You and I hold their secret. They will not let us
live.”

I nodded and set the trigger at half-cock. Pedro crept back and took the
two knives which old Sam had prepared. Then he went to the corner of the
room at the other side of the window. Anyone coming through window or
door would be skewered before he could turn his head to see where Pedro
was. I was chuckling at that grim thought when a voice called from the
front of the little hovel.

“Come on out, Frankland, the chase is over.”

It was Joey. I was about to reply, but Pedro held up his hand for
silence.

“Let them be puzzled,” he whispered.

Nell, upset by this mysterious behaviour, began to bark, but old Sam
immediately quietened her.

“We know you’re in there,” came the same voice. “Come on out and we’ll
talk business, maybe.”

Pedro drew his forefinger across his throat, expressing the sort of
business that was on their minds. Then he smiled and deliberately licked
the edge of one of his knives. The coolness of the man amazed me. I was
beginning to shiver, though it was not a cold evening.

Then John Hawke’s voice sounded, clear and cool, from the darkness. “We
have no wish to harm anyone but you, Frankland. Give yourself up now.
And you, Pedro Moreno, come out with him. No harm will come to you. I
shall remember the days when you used to be my friend. You shall go
free.”

I looked in sudden concern at Pedro. His expression of rock-like disdain
had not altered. He twitched his eyebrows and then licked the edge of
the second knife, as though making himself completely familiar with it.

“I shall count ten,” called Hawke, “and if you are not outside then, we
shall be forced to take you in other ways.”

We heard his voice begin to count. I might have been lulled by that
sound had not Pedro suddenly raised his hand and pointed to the window.
I saw the top of a hat appearing slowly in the aperture. I knew that
Pedro could not reach it from his angle, so I levelled my shotgun and
fired.

The shock to my shoulder was terrific. The rotten, twine-bound stock
shuddered in my hands and my face was stung by the flying particles of
powder. The room was suddenly filled with bitter blue smoke.

Joey’s hat flew into the air and by some strange accident of forces,
fell into the room, riddled with shot.

Outside the window Joey howled and then began to curse violently.

Old Sam seemed to enjoy that. “Hm, you’ve nobbut half-scalped him,” he
said. “He’ll be back soon for some more! Dang me if he won’t!”

Pedro made a wry face. “With luck you’ll get six shots out of that relic
of Waterloo. After that—pouf! She’ll take you with her!”

Old Sam looked shocked at first. Then he came to terms with reality and
sighed, shaking his head. “Aye,” he said, “’er won’t stand this rough
handling, won’t the old firepiece there! One shot a month I fires out of
’er. That’s quite enough, at ’er age.”

Just then a heavy blow resounded on the plank door. It shuddered as
though about to give way under the shock, and the bar which held it fast
jumped up in its sockets and almost fell to the floor.

“Jacko has found a battering-ram,” said Pedro. “We must stop that
straight away or they will be in here with us before we are ready for
them.”

Then he ran swiftly across the room, head down till he got to the
window, and raising himself suddenly, he leaned out and threw one of his
knives towards the door.

Immediately a shot cracked out and Pedro fell to the floor, smiling. A
trickle of blood made its way down the side of his face. But he did not
seem to care. He was listening.

Outside we heard a man groan then, a low and almost animal sound. Yet
there was no mistaking Giacomo’s voice.

Pedro said calmly, “He will never forgive me, amigo. I had the good
fortune to fix his hand to the door!”

Then it seemed that Giacomo had got himself free, for there was a great
bellowing and shouting of threats, and after that—silence.

“They have withdrawn to lick their wounds,” Pedro said. “Now we must
watch out, for they will wish to avenge what we have done. Joey may even
come through the window to get his hat back. He is a very mean man, that
one!”

He was staunching the flow of blood from his temple as he spoke. “I have
not known Hawke to miss before,” he said lightly. “Perhaps he has some
softer feelings for me after all!”

Just then we turned to find that old Sam had crawled over the floor with
the bottle of parsnip wine.

“Here, gentlemen,” he said, “take a pull at this. It will put new heart
into you for the next shoot!”

He spoke with a dry humour, for all the world like an old retainer who
brings a bottle of Napoleon brandy out to the master and his friend on a
cold day, when the shooting is a bit slow and the pheasant are not
rising.

We drank, passing the bottle on from one to the other. The amber fluid
had a warming effect. I felt that I had a little more confidence now in
that decrepit old piece of ironmongery I held so gingerly in my hands.

Just then a dustbin lid appeared in the window-hole. At any other time,
the apparition would have sent me off into roars of laughter. But now
the deadly purpose behind that ordinary utensil was enough to put all
laughter out of my mind and throat. Behind that shield, a man could fire
into the room through the window.

I acted automatically and pulled the trigger. This time a piece of the
stock flew away from me. Pellets from the cartridge pinged about the
room. I looked through the smoke to see that the lid was still there;
marked by shot, but still there.

Then Pedro bent, snatched up a loose piece of Cotswold stone from the
hearth, and, raising it above his head, flung it with all his force at
the dustbin lid. The impact knocked the thing away, and we heard it
clatter down below the window outside.

After that there was a long silence out on the hillside. Occasionally we
heard the hoot of the hunting owl, and sometimes in the distance, the
barking of a dog at some far-away farm. Old Nell raised her head and
listened, but did not reply. The sheep in the pen at the back of the
hovel were quiet now. The total effect was a little unnerving.

Then, from afar off, Joey’s voice carried to us on the night air. “Don’t
think we’ve left you, Frankland. We shall come back. It won’t be long
now, china!”

We heard Giacomo shouting out some incoherent insult at Pedro. Then all
was silence once again.

Pedro said, “Watch out now! They wish to give us the impression that
they are going away. But they may indeed be circling us again.”

We waited, hardly daring to speak any more. But they did not come as
suddenly as we had expected them.

I worked out later that the two must have gone back to the car for their
new equipment. They had been speaking the truth when they spoke to us
last.

As we waited, Pedro said to the old man, without any preamble or
embarrassment, “My friend, in my country when a matador is in an awkward
situation, he will sometimes say, quietly, so that no one can hear him:
‘Give me a good afternoon and a clean kill and I will buy fifteen
candles for the little altar in the Chapel.’ He means the one where the
_toreros_ go before the thing begins. Well, to-night, my friend, I say
to you: Give me a good night and _three_ clean kills, and I will buy
this old man a new house, and a new suit of clothes to wear in it.”

He smiled when he said this. But old Sam looked at him as though he was
rambling in his mind.

“I never could a-bear them bull-fights,” he said. “A young chap in the
village saw one of they things once, and it fair turned his stomach
over, he said.”

He shook his head in the dim light, again and again, staring at Pedro
with wide pale-blue eyes.

I said quietly, “Sam, this gentleman is offering to buy you a new house
and a new suit if we come through this night safely.”

Old Sam half-turned in his rocking chair and glowered at Pedro. “Then he
must be a maniac,” he said. “He never asked my opinion, did he? Well,
you tell him from me that this place suits me well enough. Mayhap it
ain’t Windsor Castle, but it’s mine, every stick and stone. I’ll be
having no new houses, I tell you, with them electricity lights and
baths. They ain’t natural. As for a suit; why, what I’ve got on has worn
me well for fifteen years, and I reckon it’ll wear me out, when all’s
said and done. I’d look a fine fool, tending the sheep at lambing time
in one of they smart city suits with a flower in me buttonhole and all.”
He turned strictly towards Pedro. “Look here, young fellow,” he said,
“if you want to make a fool of me, just you say so, and I’ll be ready
for you. The very idea!”

Then, while the old man was chattering and Pedro was looking first from
him and then to me, I caught the sound of scurrying footsteps outside,
right below the window-hole. While we had been talking, _they_ had
returned. I had no time to say anything to Pedro. I raised my shotgun
and took aim at the window. But I need not have bothered. What came
through that hole would not be deterred by my decrepit twelve-bore.

A great bundle of cloth and sacking, tied up with binder-string, and
soaked with oil and petrol, came flaming through the window. It lay in
the middle of the room, sending off thick clouds of black smoke, and
spurting so that it was difficult to get near to it.

[Illustration]

Nell shrank back into the corner, afraid for her puppies. Old Sam leaned
over her so that the flames should not harm her. Pedro ran forward and
kicked at the flaring bundle, moving it away from the old man and the
dog. His trousers were scorched, by even so brief a contact.

And while we stared at it, helpless, the crazy plank door fell inwards
with a crash, and Giacomo stood hunched in the doorway for a second,
peering through the smoke, trying to find Pedro.

But Pedro did not wait to be found; he bounded through the oily whirls
and leapt at the big man. They both went down and I lost sight of them.
My attention was turned to something more urgent; Joey had come through
the open doorway, his razor in his hand. And he was making for me, his
red-rimmed eyes full of fury.

My finger tightened on the trigger, automatically. There was a report
which sent me deaf straightway. I was flung backwards with the explosion
and my face burned with the terrible smart of the powder. The old gun
had fired her last shot.

But, fortunately, she had sent some of her charge in the direction I had
aimed for, and Joey’s hands were flung violently outwards as he fell
over in the doorway.

I tried to get to my feet, and found it rather difficult as I was
suffering from shock. But at last I crawled over to where Joey lay, his
hands over his face. The spray of pellets had certainly cut him about,
but not mortally. As I bent over him, I saw that all his wounds were
superficial ones—he had the debility of the old gun to thank for
that—and his eyes were not touched. He groaned and cursed alternately.
But I could see that all the fight had gone out of him. When he
recognized me, he said, “I give in, china! Swelp me, but I didn’t want
any part of this fight, to-night. I give in, chum, I swear. Let me be!
I’ll do anything.”

[Illustration]

I turned to see how Pedro was getting on. He was standing in a corner,
his hand raised in the act of throwing his knife. Giacomo lay,
half-winded on the floor, his eyes wide with a mortal terror. The sweat
of deathly fear stood out on his face, bright in the lamp-light. He was
gibbering in Italian, beseeching Pedro not to throw that knife. And
Pedro’s hard, brown face had the fixed look of a man who intended to
finish this feud, once and for all, and in the most primitive way known
to man.

[Illustration]

I do not think any word of mine would have deterred him; indeed, for a
strangely callous instant, I did not feel like making the effort to stop
him. I too was full of a great and incomprehensible savagery, for these
enemies were brutes and nothing more. Let them go free, and they would
turn round and strike to kill at the man who had forgiven them.

But Pedro was not intended by the fates to strike Giacomo down then. In
fact, only by some singular act of grace did any of us survive the next
three seconds.

Without the slightest warning, a sudden burst of fire from an automatic
weapon of a fairly heavy calibre tore its way through the sheep-pen door
behind us, into the room, scattering fragments of wood over us, the
bullets humming and ricochetting from the stone walls like demented
hornets.

Pedro’s hand was poised in mid-air. A strange tremor passed over his
face. At first I thought he had been shot.

“Hawke,” he said. “We forgot the Master.”

Then the voice of John Hawke came through the blocked door. “Open this
door,” he said. “I shall fire again if it is not opened when I have
counted five.”

It was the voice of a man who would have killed us all without a qualm.
The voice of a power-crazed maniac.

I had just sense enough to run forward and drag away the heavy cupboard
with which we had made fast the door earlier. I did not do it entirely
from fear for myself, but because I had no wish to see old Sam lying
dead in his own hovel after the next insane burst of fire.

Then John Hawke was standing in the room, the bright German sub-machine
rifle under his arm. He was turning from side to side, his wide eyes lit
up with something I had not seen in them before; it might have been the
lust of battle, or sheer berserk excitement—or it might have been sheer
madness. Whatever it was, it was terrible to see. Had he gone back on
his word at that moment and mown us all down, Giacomo and Joey included,
I should not have been greatly surprised.

Joey and Giacomo stared at him as fearfully as I must have done. They
even began to beg him not to fire.

He spat in their faces.

“Get up, you useless cowards,” he snarled. “Get up and act like men for
once in your dog’s lives.”

Then he seemed to see Pedro for the first time. He walked slowly towards
him, kicking the still-smouldering bundle of rags out of his path. Pedro
stood still, facing him, his dark face impassive. As Hawke came nearer,
the knife fell from the Spaniard’s hand and tinkled on the stone floor.
Old Nell began to whimper in the corner. Sam’s eyes almost stood out of
his head. But not one of us had the power to move. We were in the grip
of a nightmare, in that lonely Cotswold hut.

And when he was close to Pedro, John Hawke stopped and spoke to him in a
voice that was urgent, even vicious, but so low that we could not hear
what he said. Pedro’s face did not change, nor did his eyes waver from
Hawke’s own.

Then suddenly the Master began to strike him about the face, sometimes
with the back of his hand, sometimes with the butt of the short gun.
Pedro did not make any attempt to defend himself. He swayed like a man
who has given up any wish to avoid a punishment which he had long
expected. And at last his knees gave way and he slumped to the floor,
his head between his hands.

And when John Hawke turned from him, I saw that his lips were still
moving, but he made no sound. What emotions he felt were wordless. But
the tears ran unchecked down his fine and doom-driven face.

Old Sam came to his senses suddenly and shambled forward with a crook.

“Dang me,” he cried hoarsely, “but if no one else will, I’ll put an end
to this nonsense!”

He struck out at Hawke, catching him twice on the shoulder. As he took
aim for the third time, Hawke turned and gently warded off the blow,
putting his hand out like a blind man. Then he seemed to smile sadly at
Sam and his lips moved. He said quietly, “I have no quarrel with you,
old man. Go back to your chair and try to forget what you have seen.
Good night, and may you never give shelter to a traitor again.”

Then he passed through the door, stumbling like a drunk man, down the
hillside and into the darkness. It was as though he had forgotten us
all.


                              _Twenty-two_
                               Burnt Oak

A distant church clock struck two as we rolled along the upland highway
of the Forest of Dean. On either side the tall trees embowered us,
seeming to lean down over the cars, as though to make us go through a
tunnel.

In spite of the nagging ache of my tightly-bound wrists, I could not
help recalling the now ironical lines from _The Old Vicarage,
Grantchester_:

            “_Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,_
             _Beside the river make for you_
             _A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep_
             _Deeply above; and green and deep_
             _The stream mysterious glides beneath_
             _Green as a dream and deep as_ death.”

In our headlights the trees emerged from the surrounding gloom in more
than naturally vivid shades of green. There was certainly _death_ in the
air; only Brooke’s river was lacking to complete the picture.

Pedro sat beside me, in the back of the Morris, his hands bound and
resting on his thighs, his head bowed in silent defeat or sleep. Joey
and Jacko sat in the front seats, speechless and grim. Ahead of us the
big Jaguar, driven by John Hawke, began to slow down. We saw his
braking-lights flash once, twice, three times. Then his car gathered
speed and ploughed forward once more into the deep green tunnel, away
from us, into the night.

Joey half-turned to me and said, “Right, this is the place. The Boss has
just given us the signal. This is where you get off.”

I said tiredly, “And where are you going?”

He almost grinned, and then, pulled short by the stiffness of his
lacerated face, muttered under his breath. His tone was vicious. “We
shall follow him to Cardiff—when we have fixed you up for the night.”

The Morris pulled into the grass verge. Giacomo got out and flung open
the door.

“C’mon, you swine,” he said slowly. “Get walking now!”

They dragged us out of the car and across the grass. The boughs of trees
reached down and brushed our faces but we were too weary now to move
away from them. I do not think that Pedro even saw them; his head was
sunk on his chest and he stumbled over the rough grass like a man
walking in his last sleep.

At last we left the thickest rim of trees and made our way over a gently
sloping area of open glade. Joey stopped for a moment, as though to get
his bearings. Then he pointed to a tall tree which stood out from the
others by reason of its height and the thickness of its great trunk. It
was an immense oak.

At first I thought they were going to hang us outright on that tree; but
I reflected that neither of them had brought a length of rope, and you
can’t hang a man without rope.

But when we got near to the great tree and Giacomo flashed his torch on
its trunk, I saw with increasing horror that the end they had decreed
for us was even more terrifying than hanging. I do not know why I became
suddenly so certain of their intentions. Perhaps it was by reason of
some intuition, some increased awareness and sensibility which only
visits man’s mind when he is in a peculiar state of receptivity—such as
when he is about to die. . . .

The gnarled bark of the oak tree was split open, leaving a hole in the
shape of a much elongated triangle, perhaps two feet across at the
bottom and reaching, at its apex, to the height of a man’s chest. As the
white beam of the torch penetrated that doorway in the tree, I saw that
there had been some effort to burn the oak down from inside, for the
walls of that hollow were thickly charred. I saw also that the space
within the tree might accommodate two grown men—if they were _forced_
inside. . . .

Giacomo stepped back with a brutish grimace and waved his torch towards
the ghastly hole.

“This is your hotel for the night, gentlemen! You observe, we were
thoughtful! We reserved this nice snug little apartment for you, and you
alone! Go on, get inside, no one will disturb you, of that you may rest
assured!”

Joey began to smile too, in spite of his torn face.

“The walls are thick enough for you to scream your perishin’ heads off,”
he said. “Just relax when you get inside—it won’t make any difference,
but it’ll be more comfortable to go out that way, instead of struggling
like!”

Giacomo nodded, violently, like an animal. “Yes,” he grunted, “we shall
tap on the bark of the tree and you will know we are wishing you
good-bye. Perhaps if you tap back, we may let you out again.”

Joey slapped him respectfully on his fat shoulder. “Yes,” he said, “and
perhaps we shan’t, eh Jacko?”

Then he laughed almost as though he were hysterical, a little too
immoderately even for Giacomo, who turned and gave him a fixing stare.
Joey stopped laughing then. With a remarkably sudden change of manner,
he began to push and punch us towards the doorway of the oak tree. I
glanced at Pedro, but he walked obediently, like a hypnotized automaton.

I did not want to go down without some sort of fight, and so as Joey
came at me from behind again, I lashed out with my feet, as hard as I
could, one after the other. My right missed him, for he was nimble. But
my left caught him on the wrong foot, and he sprawled his small length,
groaning with agony and rubbing his shin.

I said, “Too bad, china! You should have thought of that!”

He scrambled up and began to run at me. I swung my foot again, this time
forwards. He stopped and backed away. Pedro turned and stared at us as
though we were creatures of a nightmare he was having. Then he turned
away again, all the fight gone out of him. When I saw that, I think I
gave up the ghost too.

Joey said, “Right, you swine, we were going to put you inside with your
legs free at least. But now you shall have a little more to think
about!”

A man with his hands tied can do little against two. They tied our
ankles with a length of electric flex which the thoughtful Joey carried
in his raincoat pocket against all eventualities it seemed. Then,
pushing us along, they forced us inside the oak, so that we leaned,
facing each other, against the charred wood of the interior.

Outside, Giacomo’s torch shone brightly. Then they began to pile soil
and turfs against the hole, and the beam of the torch faded gradually.
At last, just before they placed the last sod in position, Joey whistled
through to us and said, “What ho! my merry boys! Keep your chins up, the
sheriff is near at hand—I don’t think!”

Then he burst into peals of maniacal laughter.

Giacomo’s face appeared in the small hole. He spoke quietly, like a man
who is triumphant and does not need to shout.

“_Vaya con Dios, amigo!_” he said to Pedro. “May you reach whatever
Heaven you desire! As for me, I would rather have life! I will sometimes
think of you, in Budapest, you fool!”

He paused for a moment, then, when we thought he had gone, he looked in
again and said, “Go to your death with my hatred, Pedro Moreno, and may
the black bulls haunt you as you choke!”

Pedro did not answer: his eyes were closed.

Then they rammed the last turfs in, and we saw no more. Nor did we hear
any more, for the oak was so thick. They may have tapped on the outside
to wish us good-bye—but we did not hear them.


                             _Twenty-three_
                                Apologia

The thoughts of a man who is about to die can be of little interest to
the living, for they are set on a curious plane of half-reality,
half-dream, and that to normal men is a state of silliness. I shall not
say what went through my mind in the first sweltering hours of that
ordeal. All I will record here is that the heat became very intense and
the air very thick. Sleep was impossible, standing at the slope in that
tree, with wrists and ankles tightly bound. But after a while, the agony
of restricted limbs seemed to wear off, for, I think, the nerves became
satiated with pain and went into their own sort of coma for the while. I
found myself gasping for air like a man who has taken a mouthful of salt
water when swimming—but the gasp produced no results, for the air in
the tree was almost exhausted of its oxygen.

From time to time I lapsed into a half-state of waking-nightmare. Then I
would come to again, and would think as clearly as I had ever done, for
a few moments.

And in one of those seconds of clarity, I became conscious that Pedro
was talking to me. At least, he was talking as though he expected
someone to be listening—not in the way a man might talk if he were
musing alone.

“Hell,” he said, “what could I do? You understand, my friend, we lived
in caves down there. In caves. I can tell you that almost anything is
better than a cave. But that is what it was like then in Spain, in
Andalucia. . . .”

There was a pause, which might have been a minute, or two hours. I do
not know, the air was stifling by that time.

Then he spoke again.

“We were a large family. My little sister Chispa danced for the tourists
in her gipsy dress. My big sister Ana sold peanuts and _limonada_ at the
Theatre, dressed also in her gipsy dress. Yet both of them hated their
gipsy dress. They wanted American clothes, and to blazes with gipsy
dress! My brothers were younger than I was. They wanted motor-bikes, or
new trousers, or a loaf of bread. Usually a loaf of bread, for we often
went hungry.”

I husbanded my breath, and whispered, “What did you want, Pedro? What,
for yourself?”

He said simply, “Nothing, only to give them what they had missed. And so
I fought the bulls, the black bulls of the South. Our father had died,
and so I must look after them, the others of my family.”

Now his voice became remote, as though he had lapsed into an old dream.

“Even as a little boy I would go at night, in my rags, you understand,
and tease the black bulls in their stone pens. Sometimes we would
arrange to go there, when the _ganaderos_ were asleep, half a dozen
little gipsy boys, like me. And we would call to them softly in the
moonlight, ‘Ha! Toro! Toro!’ Call to the great bulls of Andalucia, we
little frogs, shaking our ragged drawers or shirts to attract the bulls
in the silver moonlight. . . . And they would snuffle, the great
killers, and smell man in the moonlight. Then they would come at us, at
the little frogs with their shirts held out like _capas_ and their
hearts beating like castanets . . . and we would either run away
altogether or stand there and make the cloak passes. . . .”

I said, “Were none of the boys ever killed?”

After an eternity Pedro said, “Only sometimes. Their families did not
miss them for long, there were so many of us. But usually the great
bulls sniffed that we were boys and left us alone, in our pride and our
new courage, wagging our torn shirts in the moonlight. And so we became
convinced that we should be matadors . . . when we grew up, _one
day_. . . . Matadors in dove-grey suits and black sombreros and a little
rubber ring to put our hair through at the back . . . and food to eat,
always, for ever. . . .”

I fell against the charred oak and almost howled with the pain of my
tied ankles. Then I think I lost consciousness completely and deeply.
When I came to I was almost sitting, so far had I slumped down. It was
an agonizing experience to inch my way back again to a standing position
when the cutting wires would hurt me less.

Pedro said, “When I left that manager, I was a rich young man. My
sisters had married well on my earnings, and my brothers had their bread
and their trousers, and their motor-bikes. The family did not live in a
cave any longer. My mother had her own house, outside Madrid now, and a
nice little bank balance and insurance policy. I was happy for the first
time. Then the war came, the Spanish Civil War, as you call it. . . .”

I said, “War is a bad thing, Pedro. We all know that.”

As I said it, I heard the foolishness of my remark. It was so trite and
unconvincing. Luckily, he did not seem to hear it, but went on, slowly
now.

“After the war was over, I did not go back to the bulls. Things were
different then. There was no one of my family left, no one to work for,
to love, any more. Spain was no longer my home, it was a wilderness to
me. I went to Italy, full of bitterness and revenge, to fight for
whoever had work for me to do, and money to pay my price. And so at last
I became the man you know—a rootless wanderer, a professional killer,
if you will: the right-hand man of another lost soul, John Hawke.”

I tried to make sense of Pedro’s story, his reasoning, but could not. I
shook my head in the blackness of the tree, and then I felt myself
sinking down again, but gently now, away and away, and then again away,
beyond the reach of sense and logic, into oblivion, and, I sensed,
death.

“Good-bye, Pedro,” I said. “It was interesting to meet you, in a funny
way.”

Even as I spoke those words, I thought how stupid they sounded—but
there was nothing I could do to change them. I felt myself slipping away
rapidly.

Only once at that time did I know anything. Distantly I heard Pedro’s
voice, sounding faintly and frighteningly, as from along vast corridors,
the labyrinthine underground ways of Minos, in the years beyond all
human knowing.

“They are coming for me,” he groaned. “The black bulls I killed
once. . . . They are coming in their herds with the swords in their
backs, the black bulls! They are passing by the cloak. It is the _man_
they want. They want the _man_!”


                             _Twenty-four_
                            Dai and Myfanwy

Then suddenly the heavy doors of unconsciousness grated back again, and
Pedro was silent, yet I sensed that he, like me, was aware of something
strange that was happening. Within the thick darkness of the
burial-tree, the air was stiff with our tension. It was as though a
message from the upper world had penetrated down to the grave’s dark
depths. Indeed, that is exactly what _had_ happened.

Wordless, we listened intently, hopeful and hopeless, at the same time;
glad and afraid. For outside, someone was knocking on the bark of the
oak tree.

I tried hard to bring my scattered senses together, to concentrate on
the intermittent sounds which penetrated dully and faintly that thick
casing of bark and outer wood. It was a hard task for me to accomplish,
gasping as I was for breath. But I made out at last a rhythm that I
knew. Whoever tapped on the bark of the oak was thinking of “Baa-Baa
Black Sheep!” of all things! I recognized the childish run of the notes:
long-long-long-long-short-short-short-short-long;
long-long-long-long-long-long-long. . . .

It was incredible. I gasped, “Pedro, do you know that tune?”

He answered slowly, “What tune, amigo? I hear no tune.” It was clear
that he thought me mad. I did not pursue the point, for I realized then
that it was unlikely that Pedro would know a British nursery rhyme.

I realized also, at the same time, that this could be neither Giacomo
nor Joey; the first like Pedro would not know the thing; and Joey would
be too hard-bitten to remember it even if he wished to taunt us. In any
case, his childhood had probably been spent in places where such a
childish jingle would be unknown. He would not know it, the child of
sad, sunless alleys.

Then the idea struck me that I might try to answer by tapping the same
rhythm back. . . . But the foolishness of that plan soon struck me when
I made the attempt. My hands were bound before me and I couldn’t turn to
use them on the charred wall of the tree. Nor could I raise my bound and
now almost senseless feet. If I had had a thick enough skull, I think I
would have tried using my head. But not even _my_ skull was hard enough
for the task I would have imposed on it. I could have wept with
frustration then.

Once more the tapping came. This time the beats formed themselves into:
short-short-short-long; short-short-short-long;
short-short-short-short-long-long-long-long. . . .

At first the thing baffled me; and then, as it was repeated again, I
suddenly tumbled to it. It brought back to me the memory of an elderly
uncle, who had one of those gramophones with a great green tin horn. He
often used to play an ancient and very scratchy record for me and say,
twirling his handlebar moustache as he looked over the Birmingham
rooftops from his little bed sitting-room, “Ah, Bill, my boy, you don’t
get singers like that nowadays! A real comic, Harry Champion was, in his
day! Yes, a _real_ comic!”

Someone was tapping out, “Any Old Iron!” I felt like weeping.

In the darkness of the oak, I groaned with anxiety. Three inches away a
hand was tapping out tunes on the side of the tree—and that hand could
set us free, if we could only make our existence known. My brain slid
over half a dozen schemes, each one wilder than the last.

Then, in despair, I gasped to Pedro, “There is someone outside this
tree; someone whose attention we must attract, if we are to live. How
can we do it, Pedro?”

There was a long pause, and I thought that the Spaniard had fallen into
a comatose sleep once more. But he did answer in the end.

“Are you willing to take a chance on death, amigo?” he said, weakly, but
with his old laconicism. “Take a chance on death to win life, eh?”

I said, “I will do whatever you think will get us both out of this
coffin.”

Again there was a long interval, and then Pedro said, “In my right-hand
jacket pocket, there is a cigarette-lighter. I cannot reach it with my
hands tied before me. But if I try to come towards you, you might be
able to find it, and then we can only do our best.”

I did not stop to discuss this with him. Instead, I tried to lean
forward as he inched towards me. In the thick darkness, I heard the
sound of his body rubbing against the charred blackness of the wood.

It was painful to lean out of my semi-recumbent position against the
wall of the oak—but it was the sheerest agony to feel into his pocket
when at last he came close to me. Yet I did it, and my almost nerveless
fingers at last recognized the shape and texture of his
cigarette-lighter. At a snail-like speed, I withdrew the metal object
from his deep pocket. Once when it was almost out, my throbbing fingers
lost it, and the weary business had to begin again. I could have cried
out in sheer disappointment. What if the people outside go away! I kept
thinking.

Then finally I had the lighter in my hands, my palms sweating against
the coldness of its metal.

I said, “What shall I do now, Pedro?”

He laughed weakly and said, “If you press it, there will be a flame.
Make that flame and then set it against the dry turf with which they
have walled us in. That may burn, and some time or other the flames will
work to the outside and will be seen. Then, if we are still alive and
lucky, our visitors may become curious and pull down the prison wall.”

I said, “All right. I’ll do it, if you’re game.”

He spoke sleepily now. “I am game, amigo,” he said. “For if the plan
does not work, then it will only hasten a process which has already
started. . . . We shall die quicker, that’s all.”

I waited a while, to gain strength, then I pressed down the plunger of
the lighter. The flame burned my hands until I found how I could hold it
without getting hurt too much.

I groped for the dried turf, and set the little light against it. The
stuff smouldered for a moment and then flared out, sending up dense
clouds of smoke, which flung me back against the tree, choking.

It was then that an idea came to me so sharply that in spite of all my
discomfort and pain, I could have laughed at the sudden simplicity of
it.

“Why, Pedro,” I said, “what a pair of idiots! We could burn through our
ropes and _push_ our way out!”

He grunted but said nothing. I think that he was almost unconscious
then, and that made me all the more anxious to do as I said. I grabbed
at the lighter and pressed it. Nothing happened. I pressed it harder
still and a tiny flame came from the wick, which lived only for a second
before going out. The thing had run out of fuel. In my annoyance I
dropped it and tried to curl away from the billowing smoke of the
burning turf. The tears were streaming down my face from the acrid
fumes, and my lungs were almost about to give up the nightmare
struggle—when suddenly daylight streamed into the tree. A hole
appeared, becoming bigger and bigger. The sunlight swept across my face.
I saw another face staring in amazement at me. I tried to smile—then I
pitched forward, towards the yellow sunlight. I felt hands about me, and
knew no more.

When I came round, I was lying on my back on the grass of a green glade.
I saw the leaves above my head—they were oak leaves. I shut my eyes
again in nausea!

Then a voice said, “Here man, drink this cuppa. It’ll put new life into
you, man!”

I looked up and saw a dark earnest face above me; a thin, intense,
brown-eyed face, rather aquiline in the way Welshmen often are—the dark
little Welshmen of the South; the little Celts who played such havoc
with Claudius, and ran amok for Boadicea, killing seventy thousand
Romans before they were quelled . . . the little longbow men of Crecy
and Poitiers! The black-faced miners of the Rhondda . . . the bards of
the Eisteddfod at Llangollen, or Mountain Ash—or indeed anywhere where
there is a poem to be declaimed and a song to be sung.

“Thank God for Wales, Dai bach!” I said, grabbing at the plastic mug of
tea which he held for me.

He was not more than twenty years old. His young face took on an
expression of startled surprise.

“How did you know my name, boy?” he almost gasped.

I said, “That’s an official secret, man!” Then I turned and saw that a
young girl kneeled at my other side. Her hair was of a glorious shade of
golden-auburn, and it was done up in what I believe is called a Pony’s
Tail. Her eyes were wide and blue. Her skin was of the ivory sort that
so often goes with such hair and such eyes. She was perhaps eighteen but
might have been older. I saw that she wore a black sweater and jeans. I
said, foolishly, “And I bet your name is Blodwen and you are Dai’s young
lady.”

She said coolly, “You are wrong then. My name is Myfanwy and I am his
sister, so there!”

I grinned and then groaned. “How is my friend?” I managed to gasp. “Is
he all right?”

Dai said, “He is a strong man. When we cut him loose he helped to carry
you here before he passed out. You have a lot to thank him for, man.”

I tried to get up to see Pedro. But suddenly I felt very sick and rolled
over, helpless.

When I came to once more, the sunlight leapt at me from a different
angle. It was not surprising for by now it was afternoon. We had been
rescued in the morning—and now the sun was hinting that, before too
long, it would be falling once more below the horizon.

And when I opened my eyes this time, Pedro was sitting close to me,
smoking a strong black cigarette, his hands bandaged with handkerchiefs,
his face black with smoke and charcoal, but smiling, his long Spanish
smile.

“Hello there, friend Bill,” he said, “and how would you like a
hard-boiled egg? We have saved one for you! Though, I must admit, it was
a great temptation for me to steal it while you slept.”

I said, “Give it to me, amigo! I am ravenous!”

The girl with the Pony’s Tail smiled and said, “That’s good. He is
hungry. It is a sign that he will live! Pass that egg over, Dai, you
greedy airman, you!”


                             _Twenty-five_
                        The Garage on the Bridge

As we ate the last of the picnic food and drank the last cup of coffee
from the thermos flask, Dai said, “You could have knocked me over with a
feather, a budgerigar’s feather, look you, when I saw that smoke coming
out of the tree. Spontaneous combustion, like, I said to myself.”

Myfanwy winked shamelessly at me, “My brother, Dai, is a _clever one_,
you see. Dai Big-Head they call him in the Royal Air Force, where he is
doing his Service. So clever, he is, they will make him a Group Captain
one day, if he is not careful. But at the moment, you see, he is only an
A.C. Plonk!”

Dai got up and began to threaten the girl but she rose and ran round the
oak tree, laughing.

He nodded back to her and said, “My sister Myfanwy is a shameless woman.
And she is a schoolteacher in Newport, look you! What manner of woman is
that to have charge of the innocent minds of the younger generation!
Ashamed I am, very often, when she is up to her cheeky talk. One day I
shall forget my promise and tell father about her!”

He grinned as he spoke. I felt that Dai Big-Head was a Good Chap. “If I
felt stronger,” I said, “I would help you to catch her, Dai. I have two
sisters. I know how it is!”

Pedro flicked his cigarette butt into the gorse and said, “And I should
be on her side, my friends! So sort that one out!”

Myfanwy came from behind the tree. “Good for you, Pablo, or whatever
your name is. I like you already, I must say!”

Pedro said drily, “My name is Pedro. But I am glad to be rechristened
Pablo by one such as you, señorita!”

He made a little bow in her direction. She blushed and looked away.

“Aye, aye!” said Dai, teasing. “I can see we are intruding. Come on,
let’s put the picnic basket in the car.”

With mocking pretences of leaving the others alone, he and I carried the
wicker-basket out of the glade. When we were beyond the bushes, Dai
turned and said seriously, “Look, mister, I’m not going to ask you how
you got into that mess. All I can say is that you seem all right to
me—and that’s good enough. The types who put you inside must be the
wrong ’uns as far as I am concerned.”

I patted him on the shoulder and said, “Good old Air Force! A pity I was
in the Army.”

He grinned and said, “Oh, I dunno, there’s good blokes even in the
Army—if you look hard to find ’em, like!”

He said no more about the tree incident then; but before we came to his
car, I felt that I must take him into my confidence.

I said, “I’ve got to be frank. The men who put us there are
dangerous—really dangerous. They have no pity, as you may have guessed.
They want us dead. We might even meet them on the road. They are heading
for Cardiff—but with such men, one never knows.”

He turned, wide-eyed and said, “Have they got a fast car, chum?”

I nodded. Just then we came round a hedge and I saw an Austin Seven, of
a vintage that was becoming a little long in the tooth even before
Munich. Not even the bright colours in which its aged bodywork was
painted could disguise its senility. In the little back window a piece
of coloured cardboard announced to all other road-users:

“PLEASE PASS—ABOUT TO BREAK DOWN!!!”

Dai said, “We shouldn’t stand much of a chance, should we?”

I shrugged my shoulders and looked away. There was nothing I could say.

Just then Myfanwy and Pedro appeared smiling. “I’ve just been telling
Pablo,” she said cheekily, “that it was my idea to play that guessing
game, where you knock out the rhythms of tunes. We were waiting for the
primus to start, you see. I tapped out a Nursery Rhyme, and Dai tapped
out some silly Cockney song he’s picked up in the Air Force.”

Dai said, “She just wants you to praise her intelligence in rescuing
you, that’s all. She doesn’t say that it was me who got burned doing the
donkey work!”

I glanced at his hands and wrists for the first time then. They were
burnt.

I said, “Let me drive, Dai. Those burns will cause you some trouble,
maybe.”

He grinned and said, “We’re tough in the Raff, old boy! Besides, you’d
never be able to drive Maggie here. She’d baffle Mike Hawthorn, I tell
you. Won’t go for anybody but me!”

“She only goes for you when she feels like it, as well,” said Myfanwy,
dodging away again. Dai gave her a nasty look and did not reply.

Somehow we squeezed into Maggie, and somehow Dai got her to start. We
bumped over the grass and then on to the road once more.

Dai said, “The only sensible thing is to take you with us. My old man’s
got a little garage in Caerleon, right on the bridge. No one would think
of looking for you there, man. Safe as houses you’d be, I tell you.”

Myfanwy, in the back seat with Pedro said, “That is the best idea you’ve
had since you have been on leave, Dai. We can put them both in the spare
room. I can take a blanket off your bed, and off Dad’s, and that would
be just right. I only hope Dad has thought to get some bread in, then we
could have some nice fried cheese on toast when we get in.”

Pedro was smiling quietly to himself. I caught his thoughts, briefly. He
was suddenly back in a world he had once known so well—the world where
you had to count the blankets you could lay your hands on, the world
where every crust of bread meant something important. I sensed this, but
I sensed something else as well—that Dai and Myfanwy were the good
honest folk of Britain, my own folks, whose lives might be in danger one
day if that crazed maniac, John Hawke, was allowed to get away with the
papers in that innocent-looking manilla envelope.

I came out of my reverie to hear Dai’s voice. “Just got another six
months to do,” he was saying. “Then I’ll be out of the Service and back
at the garage. Dad’s not so young as he was, and it’ll be a good thing
when I’m back in harness.”

Myfanwy said, “Yes, then I might have an occasional night out, at the
pictures, or somewhere, instead of doing all the housework. Dai has had
so much practice peeling spuds in the cookhouse, he’ll be a treasure
when he does get out! Can you imagine him in his little pink apron, eh?”

She went off into peals of laughter again. Dai trod savagely on the
accelerator and got almost another mile an hour out of the old car.

I looked back again. Pedro was asleep. For the first time since I had
known him, his lined face wore an expression of relaxed peace. His long
frame almost filled the back seat, causing the smiling Myfanwy to
squeeze herself into a tiny corner. But Pedro was more comfortable in
that little car than he had ever been in John Hawke’s great Jaguar.

And so we rolled on our way towards Caerleon, up and down hills,
alongside rivers, over old stone bridges. Once the sun came out from
behind a cloud and shone in all its fulness for a moment on a field of
mustard or charlock, which lay on the other side of the great Severn.
The sight was a revelation of beauty to my aching eyes, for the patch of
ground suddenly burned with a light golden fire. It was such a field
that Princes might once have ridden over, and chroniclers have called
later, the Field of the Cloth of Gold. . . .

And I thought of the words of the _Mabinogion_, that wonderful set of
old Welsh tales. . . . “The Emperor Arthur lay at Caer Llion on
Usk. . . .” Suddenly, out of the violent turmoil of the present-day
world—the world of cars and revolvers and political treachery—I was to
find a brief sanctuary in an ancient town, where once, as the old bards
had said, King Arthur himself had sought rest.

“The Emperor Arthur lay at Caer Llion on Usk.” The words drummed in my
aching head. Was there really a King Arthur? I wondered, idly. On a
sudden impulse, I turned to ask Myfanwy what she thought. After all, she
was Welsh and a schoolmistress—so she should know!

But at that moment, she knew nothing. She was leaning her auburn head on
Pedro’s broad shoulder, fast asleep and smiling a strange, secret little
smile. The dark Spanish black of his hair against the bright Welsh red
of hers made a striking contrast. I turned away, a little embarrassed.

Then I saw that Dai was grinning as he drove along. He had seen them
fall asleep together, in his small cracked driving-mirror, and he was
amused, in the ironical way of brothers the world over.

“It’s turned out quite nice, like, to-day,” he said wrily. “Shouldn’t
wonder if the weather keeps up to-morrow too.” He paused a moment and
seemed to nod over his shoulder. “And the day after,” he added, “with a
bit o’ luck.”

I didn’t quite know what to say, so I said nothing. Dai was suddenly
curious, though, it seemed.

“Your friend back there,” he whispered, “what might his trade be, like?”

Now, I thought, I’ll drop a bombshell on this amused little Celt—one
that will make him remember this day for ever, that will make him wonder
if Rugger isn’t after all, a game for cissies!

“He’s a bull-fighter,” I said, as casually as I could.

Dai took it on the chin without batting an eyelid. He clucked for a
second and nodded his dark head wisely. Then he said, “Quite a boyo,
hey? Yes, sir, quite a boyo! There’s a young fellow who keeps a pub, I
forget its name, a nice whitewashed place just below Cader Idris, you
know, and he’s just crazy about bulls and bull-fighters. Got his saloon
bar all covered with paintings of these chaps doing their stuff, like,
with the cape and the sword. Quite colourful it is too, you know, when
you are quaffing a nice pint of shandy, like. Gives _tone_ to the place,
you see. It’s a nice pub, too. I wish I could remember the name—there’s
a little lake by it, like, and a phone kiosk on the roadside; not that
anyone out there would want to use a phone, like. Deader than Caerleon
it is, by all accounts.”

I said, “Is Caerleon dead, then?”

Dai replied, “Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. My old man likes
it, maybe because my mother used to say she’d like to settle there,
before she died. And then Dad shut up shop in Cardiff and came out here.
So I reckon Caerleon ain’t so bad.”

I said, “Is Caerleon on the road to Cardiff then?” I tried to cover the
sudden tremor in my voice as I spoke. Dai did not seem to sense my
concern.

“Yes,” he said. “You can get to Cardiff that way. Did you want to go
there?”

I thought quickly; what could I do in Cardiff now? I would be too late
to stop John Hawke from getting there. But perhaps if I could warn the
Cardiff police, I might stop him from boarding the _Nautilus_.

“No,” I said at last. “I don’t want to go to Cardiff. All I want is a
couple of day’s rest, to get my thoughts straight again. Are you on the
phone at home?”

Dai shook his head. “No, but there’s one on the bridge, like, only
twenty yards away. You have been through a tough time, man,” he said.
“Anybody can see that. I shan’t try to pry into your business. I’m
satisfied you’re on the level. I’ll take you at face value and leave it
at that. You can have two day’s rest and quiet with us, if you wish. And
no questions asked. I think my sister would like it, in a way, you know.
And I feel like a bit of company, like. But all I ask you is, don’t
breathe a word about that tree business to my old man; he won’t stand
for any weird stuff. A proper tartar he can be if he thinks things
aren’t on the straight and level. So let’s just say we met you, eh?”

I said, “That won’t convince him, will it?”

Dai grinned. “It will if we say your car broke down and we gave you a
lift back here till you could get it right. We could make it realistic,
like, say it caught fire and your friend back there burnt his hands
trying to put it out.”

I smiled. “What if your father wants to go out and see the car,” I said,
“in a professional capacity?”

Dai said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime,
here’s the bridge at Caerleon, and that’s our place at this end.”

A long grey stone bridge leaned low over the Usk, its balustrade warmed
by the last rays of the sun. On either side the gently undulating hills
rose, seeming to shut in this little place of peace and tranquillity. In
the shallows a man fished in long rubber waders, casting his line again
and again, patiently. He seemed as timeless and as peaceful as the town
itself.

At the near end of the bridge was a garage, a small place, painted red
and displaying car tyres and lubricants, accessories and cleaning
materials. A row of petrol pumps stood before the window.

Above the doorway a sign proclaimed: “Elwyn Lewis and Son. Car Repairs a
Speciality.”

“That’s us,” said Dai proudly. Then, pointing beyond the garage, “and
that’s our bungalow.”

I saw a small red-brick house with a high chimney, and rambler roses
climbing up the front porch. A light burned in one room and showed me a
bright, clean picture of homely comfort. In the windows, red geraniums
stood in whitewashed pots.

“Who’s the gardener?” I asked.

Dai grinned, “My old man,” he said. “He’s fonder of flowers than he is
of cars, to tell the truth. I think he’d rather prune his roses than
sell a pumpful of petrol any day!”

We stopped and Dai leaned over to waken Myfanwy. I stepped into the road
and then let out a groan. It had been newly gravelled.

“What size shoes do you take, Dai?” I asked.

“Eight and a half, man,” he said. “Why?”

“You’ll be short of a pair once I get inside,” I said. “That’s the size
I need—but I’d borrow them if they were twelves, the state my feet are
in.”

He laughed, “You’re welcome,” he said. “We’ll tell my old man you lost
yours in the fire! Come on, Myfanwy girl, we’ve reached Kings Cross!”

In the red kiosk, twenty yards from the little garage, I phoned the
Cardiff police. Somehow I didn’t dare give my name though they demanded
it. But when I told them that the murderer of the policeman at Beltenham
would try to board the _Nautilus_, they listened. I described Hawke,
Giacomo and Joey—and then I put down the receiver. Suddenly I too felt
a traitor, for I had in a way begun to pull the noose round Pedro’s
neck. He had been with Hawke that night at Beltenham—but now he was my
friend.


                              _Twenty-six_
                             Restless Peace

“Very well, gentlemen, we’ll look at your car later then. In the
meantime, we shall be glad of your company,” said old Elwyn Lewis,
knocking his pipe out carefully into his hand, so as not to leave a
speck of ash where Myfanwy had dusted.

I lay back in the broad brown corduroy chair and eased my tired limbs in
a way I had not known for days. Everything about this little house was
right—just right. One might scoff at it, but down in the deep heart of
things, it was _right_. Just as everything John Hawke stood for was
wrong, desperately _wrong_. I shuddered to think of what might happen
should this right and his wrong ever meet. . . . I thrust this thought
away and looked round the room again.

On an oak rail round the wall, bright blue, willow-pattern plates were
neatly arranged. Two china dogs, spotted red, stood guard on the brick
fireplace, gazing with beady black eyes at the narrow Welsh dresser, on
which paraded four highly polished pewter tankards. In one corner of the
room a small glass-fronted cabinet housed porcelain replicas of ships
and bulldogs and lighthouses and castles—a “Present from Harlech” . . .
“Souvenir of Beddgelert” . . . “Memories of Snowdon”. In another corner,
a curiously carved three-legged oak chair stood, unsat on, but dominant,
as though conscious of its dignity and status among the more ordinary
pieces of the little room.

Myfanwy saw me looking at the chair and said, “That’s Dad’s bardic
chair. He won it at Aber in 1927, didn’t you, Dad? Say your poem for us,
Dad, the one that won the chair, then.”

Elwyn Lewis smiled and shook his head. “Finished I am with such
tarradiddles, girl,” he said. “Poetry is for the young, not for old
fogies like me, now.”

Myfanwy put her arm round his shoulder. “Why, you’re not old, Dadda
bach,” she said, “only _mature_, that’s all. If I ever married a man, it
would be someone like you, then.”

The old man smiled and turned away. “Pour me another cup of cocoa,
girl,” he said, “and stop talking nonsense.”

He sat, slightly built, like his son, his back as straight as a ramrod,
at the table with the little red and white checkered cloth. His white
hair and close-clipped moustache gave him the appearance of a soldier
who belonged to some earlier war. He did not look like a bard—but then,
he did not look like a garage owner. He resembled perhaps more than
anything else an elderly ex-officer, fallen on humble but quite happy
days.

Dai said, “One of Kitchener’s Army, weren’t you, Dad? See that picture,
Mr. Frankland? That hole in it is where Dad pushed the broomstick
through it when we were kids. Trying to show us how to shoulder arms,
weren’t you, Dad!”

Myfanwy said, “Yes, you should see his medals, Mr. Pablo. Splendid they
are at that, aren’t they Dad?”

As I listened to the two of them, gently teasing their father, yet
teasing him with words which only thinly covered their pride in his
achievements, I understood even more clearly into what a happy family we
had stumbled. Britain must be full of such families, I thought—and each
one of them was worth a score of such men as John Hawke, handsome and
courageous as he was. And whoever brought Hawke crashing to the dust
would be protecting such men as Elwyn Lewis and their children.

As she wandered about, filling our cups, watering the red geraniums in
the windows, Myfanwy was singing—“Dafydd y Garreg Wen”. The plaintive
melody lingered about the little room and Dai took it up in a light
tenor voice, embroidered the air, turning it into something richer and
more complex.

“I cannot stand this,” said Elwyn Lewis. “It gets on my nerves, unless I
join in too, look you!”

Smiling, he added a baritone part to the ancient song, so that now the
three voices wandered, sometimes in harmony, sometimes providing
counter-melodies, all spontaneously yet with perfect control.

And when they had brought the song to its dying fall and were silent
again, Pedro said, “I have heard many people make music, of their sort,
but this is a music which I could come to love more than most I have
heard. It is the music of an old people, I think. A people who have seen
many changes, and yet have lived through them all with courage.”

Dai said, “We have our language and our songs and they keep us happy
enough, don’t they, Dad?”

The old man said, “Once, when I was a green youngster, I thought we
should break away from England and live our own lives—even if we had to
do it with guns. But now I know that we who thought like that were
wrong, even wicked. Wales is a little country—we could not support
ourselves. We should soon die. It is a geographical necessity for us to
live in a great family with England and Scotland if we are to live well,
as men should. It has taken me many years to understand that we are all
parts of a family—whoever we are, wherever we come from—Africa,
Israel, India, anywhere. All one family. And no man has a right to split
that family.”

Pedro said, “Do you not believe in the glory of your race? Are you not
proud to be Welsh?”

Elwyn Lewis turned to him with a smile and said quietly, “I am a bit of
a historian in my way, Mr. Pablo, and I have thought quite a lot about
these things, when trade has been slack, like. I will answer you—yes, I
am proud of the glorious things we Welsh people have done, and I am glad
they have at times shown their English brothers and their Scottish
brothers and their Breton brothers that they can hold their end up. When
Wales wins a rugby football match, I am as pleased as any man. When we
men of the Welsh Fusiliers held our salient against the German, I was
proud to serve with them. But so should any man feel about his country.
Yet he should see the good in another country too, man. And I tell you
this, Mr. Pablo, any man in these islands who pats himself on the back
too hard for his racial purity is living in a fool’s paradise, as they
say. Who are we, I ask you? Some of us, such men as myself, came here at
the dawn of history from the Mediterranean—our brothers were the
Berbers, even your own people; others of us came from Gaul much
later—my daughter, Myfanwy, bears the trace of that ancestry in her
golden hair; others of us come from Germany, and Norway, and even
Phoenicia. Who are we to boast of racial purity?”

Dai said, “And judging from the length of time those old Romans were in
these parts, there’s no knowing how Italian we are, look you!”

Pedro said drily, “Then you would not mind if your daughter married a
foreigner? A man from India, perhaps, who sold carpets for a living?”

Elwyn Lewis turned and faced the Spaniard. “Mr. Pablo,” he said gravely,
“the man my daughter marries will be the man she loves. And I have never
heard yet that the colour of a man’s skin makes any difference to the
heart that beats in his breast. As for selling carpets—well, we’ve all
got to sell something to live, haven’t we? I sell petrol; Myfanwy sells
what learning she has; you no doubt sell something, if the truth be
known. So why not carpets? They are beautiful things and give pleasure.”

He rose from his chair and taking up his pipe, walked from the room.
Near the door he stopped, as though afraid he might have hurt Pedro. He
turned back and smiled, as though passing the whole thing off as a joke.
Then he went outside.

Pedro bowed his head gravely after him and then said, “Your father is a
good man, Myfanwy Lewis. He has more sense in his head than many a
politician.”

Myfanwy smiled at him and said, “We love him, Dai and I. He has always
been kind to us, like that. The world would be a good place if all men
saw things his way.”

Dai said, “I’d kill anybody who harmed him.”

As he spoke his brown hands clenched. I was not prepared for such a
sudden show of emotion. I looked at the young fellow. His brown eyes
stared back into my own. And then I knew that if John Hawke ever
intruded into this home to destroy this peace, Dai Lewis might well be
the little dagger that tumbled him to the ground.

I saw this in a sudden flash, and then I smiled at myself. I must be
tired, I thought.

I rose and said, “I’ve had a tough day. If you don’t mind, I’ll turn
in.”

Dai said, “Yes, get a good night, we shall go up the hill and see the
Roman remains to-morrow. It’s early closing day, so Dad can join us and
tell us all about it.”

Myfanwy said, “Yes, Mr. Pablo, there’s a wonderful Amphitheatre—a bull
ring, sort of.”

Pedro said, “I shall be interested to see that. It will be more in my
line, perhaps, than many other things.”

That night in the little low bedroom which we shared I heard the many
voices of the river, and the sudden crying of the owl. Sleep would not
come to me, I was so full of the problem which lay before me. Was I now
to abandon my hunting-expedition entirely and to let John Hawke go his
own way; or was I to go on, to seek him out again and risk what might
happen to me?

Then Pedro stirred in his bed and leaning over to the bedside table, lit
a cigarette and sat up smoking it. The red glow shone through the
darkness like a minute lighthouse beam, throwing his face into some
measure of light whenever he drew on the cigarette. I could see that his
eyes were closed and that his face wore a worried expression. He was
silent, though I think he knew that I was still awake.

At last I ventured to say, “What’s on your mind, Pedro?”

He replied gently, “I am thinking that I ought to leave this place, to
go away. If I went through the window now and they never saw me again,
perhaps it would be the best thing.”

I said, “What’s come over you, Pedro? You could be happy here, at least
for a day or two, while you give yourself a chance to make up your mind
what lies in the future for you.”

He threw the cigarette through the open window and said at last, “These
folk make me feel like a traitor. I should betray them if I stay any
longer and shared their hospitality. I fancy I might go to America and
start again. There no one would know about me. I could maybe get to
Mexico City and find myself some sort of job in the Stadium. It’s the
life I know. I think I might learn to be helpful to somebody, a useful
man again.”

I hardly knew what to say to this, and when I spoke, my words sounded
fatuous, even to me!

“I reckon you could be a useful man if you stayed in this country,” I
said. “You’re the one exception that breaks the rule about the leopard
not being able to change his spots. What’s more, you are my friend. I
never thought you would ever be my friend, but you are.”

He moved quietly over to the window and stood there, looking out in the
moonlight over the broad river Usk.

Then he said cynically, “I am not sure that I have it in me to be a
friend to anyone, amigo. Once I thought I was John Hawke’s friend, but
see what I did to him—I betrayed him.”

I said, “You must not call it betrayal. You did right. You acted as any
normal man should act.”

He said almost bitterly, “My friend, when a man has pledged himself to
another, he should be prepared to sacrifice what men call right. He
should be prepared to do anything for his friend—and I betrayed Hawke.
I shall not stay to betray you, or these good people who have given me
shelter and friendship.”

I said, “Would you stay if I pointed a pistol at you?”

He said in a whisper, “I almost wish you would—and pressed the
trigger.”

From the tone of his voice, I knew that he was suffering, deep in his
heart. His break with John Hawke had meant more to him than any ordinary
man could have realized, I could hear that.

At last I said, “Pedro, listen to me; I’ve got a confession to make
too.”

And then, hiding nothing, I told him how I had come to hunt John Hawke.
He listened silently and when I had finished he said, “You took money to
hunt the man down, so what?”

I said, “What do you think of me now?”

He laughed lightly and sardonically. “My friend,” he said, “my dear
simple friend, I would have done just the same if I had been you, if I
had been British.”

He paused for a moment and then punched one fist into the bandaged palm
of the other. “In fact,” he said, “though I still respect the courage of
John Hawke; though I still set him among the bravest men I have known,
or could know, I think that to gain my own peace of mind, I must soon
hunt him myself—but my task would be simpler than yours, amigo, for I
should kill him if I found him, without any qualms. I should kill him
because I have seen that he is evil as well as brave, and that for the
sake of his own revenge, he would destroy the good folk of this world.”

He stopped and then said with a groan, “I would kill him with these
hands.”

I said, “Sleep to-night, Pedro. To-morrow you will see more clearly what
we have to do. You are tired, as I am; your heart is speaking now, not
your mind.”

He began to shudder and I led him back to his bed, as though he were a
child or a blind man. He lay down when I ordered him to do so and seemed
to sleep at last.

As for me, I stayed awake half the night, tired as I was, to see that he
did not change his mind and slip away.


                             _Twenty-seven_
                              Fateful Day

By half-past seven the next morning I was out on the bridge at Caerleon,
looking over the river which was now bright and golden in the early
sunshine. The surrounding hills were green and pleasant. An enthusiastic
fisherman was already up to his waist in the water, hoping no doubt to
take home a catch for his breakfast. Dai was out in front of the garage,
polishing his old car, Maggie, and hissing like an ostler as he rubbed
at her battered flanks. Suddenly, in spite of my doubts and fears, life
seemed simple and fresh and clean once more. It was summer, and the
summer-time of life—what more could one say?

And then something happened which cast a strange shadow across the
morning. I should have been pleased, but I was thinking of Pedro.

The newspaper boy came over the bridge whistling in the sunshine, his
sacking bag at his side. He saw that I was somehow connected with Dai
and held out the morning paper to me. “Save me going round to the back
of the garage,” he said with a grin, before he walked on.

Casually I opened the _Western Mail_. Then my hands began to shake. The
bridge and the garage went out of focus for a moment, and my ears no
longer heard Dai’s hissing song.

And when things were clear again, I walked on to the bridge and opened
the paper once more. There was no mistake about these heavy black
headlines:

              “NAUTILUS” RAIDED IN DOCK: BATTLE ON BOARD!

The account which followed was classically stark; yet there was
something in its very brevity which was chilling, an air of finality
which five full pages could not have achieved.

“Last night, just before she was due to sail for Buenos Aires, Cardiff
policemen made a surprise raid on the cargo-ship _Nautilus_. In an
engine-room gun-battle, two policemen were seriously wounded. Police are
now searching for two men, one of them a Corsican, who made their escape
in a stolen car. A third man, committed at Birmingham Assizes on
previous occasions for robbery with violence, was apprehended. He has
since made statements with regard to the Beltenham murder.”

So the hunt was on! So Joey had blabbed! My brain whirled as I tried to
work out what this all meant. . . . The papers were safe, but Hawke and
Jacko were on the loose, in a car: but they were not likely to be
travelling by daylight during such a hue-and-cry. They would more
probably hide out by day and travel at night, along relatively unused
roads.

The irony of it all was that Pedro was not mentioned, and then I
realized why not—as far as Joey was concerned Pedro—and myself, for
that matter—was dead and safely tucked away where no one would find
him. Joey would never put a noose round his own neck by bringing us into
the story.

But what would happen if the police _did_ catch Hawke and Giacomo? Would
they mention him—would they say that he had been one of them, but they
had murdered him in a hollow tree in the Forest of Dean? And that I lay
trussed-up with him . . . ?

No, somehow I felt that we should not be mentioned. We had passed out of
their world. . . . That was convenient. Now all that remained was for
Hawke and Giacomo to be retaken before they might pass on the Beltenham
papers to another agent—and for them to pay the final penalty for what
they had done that moonlit night, alongside the barbed-wire fence at the
Research Station. . . .

And as I thought that, I felt a prickling realization that my
comfortable dream was going to shatter itself against hard
reality. . . . It just couldn’t happen as simply as that. To convict
them, there had to be witnesses of the Beltenham affair, and the
works-policeman who had already given evidence was so uncertain about
the men involved, or the type of car they used, that no jury could bring
in a satisfactory verdict on such haphazard statements.

No, if Hawke was to be brought to justice, I must step forward now and
give evidence. But if I did, then one way or another Pedro would have to
be mentioned. . . . And that was what I wanted to avoid. I owed him
something—my friendship. Yet I owed something to that dead policeman
and his family—even more than I did to Pedro.

My dilemma was too great. I felt that I must play for time, and then
. . . and then . . . I did not know.

I put the paper in my pocket, tightly folded. I felt that Pedro mustn’t
know yet at all costs. That would be the last straw, for he would surely
swing back to Hawke in his distress and try to help him.

As I walked back across the bridge, I knew that Pedro was the sort of
man who would sacrifice all for a friend in trouble. He had shown as
much to me, when he knocked Jacko down in the dark alley after the
meeting at Porchester.

Dai said, “Where’s the paper, man? I want to see how that big South
African boxer is shaping, like. A real killer, he is, by all accounts.”

I said, “Paper?”

Dai smiled. “Come off it,” he said, “I saw the lad give it to you when I
was cleaning the car.”

I put on a stupid expression and said, “Oh, you mean the paper! Was that
what it was? Look, Dai, you’ll think I’m the craziest coot in the world,
but I just rolled it up and pushed it through the balustrades, into the
river. I was thinking, preoccupied, you know how it is, and I just
pushed it overboard. That’s all.”

His eyebrows raised and he scratched his head. “Well,” he said, “if
that’s what happened, then there’s nothing we can do about it, I
suppose, but you’ll have to take a beating when Myfanwy knows you’ve
lost it. She reads the serial.”

I said, “I’ll get another one later for her.”

But when I tried to tell Myfanwy, she waved me aside with a smile and
said, “Serial, indeed! I’ll be too busy looking after you men to-day to
have time to read serials, look you.” And she bustled me to my chair and
set a plate of bacon and eggs in front of me. Pedro was already down,
smoking his black Mexican cigarettes as he sat at the table. He regarded
me with a narrowed eye.

“What was in the paper, amigo, that you threw it away?” he said, so
quietly that no one else heard.

I said, “Another Rail Strike threatened. I got so fed up with it all, I
threw the wretched paper away in disgust.”

He stared through me and said ironically, “Why should you worry about
Rail Strikes? You seem to ride in cars most of the time, from what I
have seen of you.”

A wicked little smile played on his thin lips.

He stubbed out his cigarette then and said, “I’ll get a paper, maybe,
when we go out, and see for myself about this Rail Strike that causes
you so much anger, my friend.”

I shrugged my shoulders then and said, “Please yourself, it’s a free
country.” I began to demolish my breakfast.

Pedro got up and walked round the room, touching this and that, as
though he had already become fond of it. At last he turned towards me
and said softly, “I’ve got a fair idea of what was in the paper, amigo.
John Hawke has come unstuck, that’s it, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“And Joey has blown the whole works sky high?”

I nodded again.

“And now Hawke and Jacko are on the run—and the police are looking for
them everywhere?”

I nodded for the third time.

He whispered, “Then it is time for me to go. This settles it. This is
the parting of the ways, amigo.”

Myfanwy came in with his breakfast then. “Carry on, Mr. Pablo,” she
said, “I’ll be in in a minute with mine. Dai and Dad never eat
breakfast. They say it dulls the brain!”

She bustled out again into the tiny kitchen.

I said, “If you have any sense, Pedro Moreno, you’ll stay where you are.
No one would think of looking for you here, even if they knew you
existed. The Lewis’s are respectable folk and would not harbour enemies
of the Government, would they? Think of it—an ex-soldier like old
Elwyn, a National Serviceman like his son, and a schoolmistress like
Myfanwy.”

He said, “I should be sheltering in the protection of a British family
whose way of life, no doubt, the Press will claim we intended to
destroy. That would be a cowardly thing to do.”

I said, “You are just being a heroic fool, now, Pedro. You know that if
you go, you will upset at least one of this family.”

He was about to say something sharp to me then, but Myfanwy came in with
her own breakfast and sat down with us, chatting gaily about the Roman
ruins we were to visit that afternoon.

When we had finished breakfast and she had left us to go into the
kitchen, Pedro said, “Very well, amigo. I will meet you half-way. I
shall go to-night. Say no more, I shall go to-night.”

I could see that there was no point in trying to change his mind on the
matter, however much I hated the idea of his going. I wondered how we
should break the news to Dai, and especially to Myfanwy. . . .

Then something rather curious happened. We were standing in the little
garden behind the bungalow, beneath an archway over which red rambler
roses grew, when Dai came up the narrow path towards us. His face was
very solemn and he held out something in his hand. It was a pair of dark
green sun-glasses. He walked to Pedro and held them out to him, “Put
these on,” he said. “The sun gets pretty strong down here, by the river.
You might get eye-strain.”

Pedro smiled a little sourly and took them, trying them on. They changed
his appearance considerably.

He said laconically to Dai, “You bought them for me at the paper shop,
my friend?”

Dai turned away and began to kick a stone along the path. He did not
answer.

But later, as Pedro and I were sitting beside the river, with the sun
warm on our backs, he came down the bank towards us and said, “Look, you
two, I don’t know anything about you, and what bit I know at all may be
all newspaper blah—but taking it all round, I think it would be best if
you got on your way as soon as you can, without rousing too much
_suspicion_ here. It looks like you are mixed up in this _Nautilus_
affair. One of them is a Corsican.”

Pedro slapped him lightly on the knee and said, “Dai, my friend, that
idea was already in my mind, too. What do you suggest?”

The young Welshman skimmed a stone across the water pensively and then
said, “I’ll take you out to Tintern Abbey to-night, about dusk time.
We’ll say you want to see the ruins by moonlight, or some such. You
sound a bit like an American, so you can put on the old tourist act, if
you wish. But whatever you do, from then on it’s all yours. You might
make your way to Bristol, I don’t know. But my advice to you would be to
find a hotel in Tintern and lie up there for a few days. I don’t know
whether I’m doing right, but Dad and Myfanwy have taken a liking to you,
and I’m doing it for them, not for you. Understand?”

Pedro smiled gravely and said, “I appreciate what you say, my friend.
I’ll try not to let you down.”

Dai turned to me, “Perhaps there’s no reason why you shouldn’t stay on
here, if you want to,” he said. “You’re not one of _them_, are you?” I
could see that he was bewildered by the complexity of the affair.

I said, “No, Dai, I’m not one of the gang you read about in the
paper—but I’ll go along with Pedro just the same.”

For a moment the little Welshman stared at me. “You are ready to betray
your country for him?” he said.

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “but I’ll just see him off the premises
safely, so to speak, if I can. That would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?”

Once more little Dai scratched his dark head in bewilderment and said,
“I dunno! Really, I dunno.”

Then an idea struck him. “I was told to fetch you in for dinner,” he
said. “Dad’s closed the shop and Myfanwy’s hopping mad that the
omelettes will be burnt. She wants us to make an early start for the
ruins.”

“Lead on, my friend,” said Pedro, more gaily than I had heard him speak
for a long time. “Let us at least part friends—they tell me the
quickest way to make an enemy of a woman is to spoil her lunch
arrangements!”


                             _Twenty-eight_
                        The Storm Clouds Gather

It is remarkable how, even in times of the most intense stress and
anxiety, the mind may find for itself small sunlit islands of peace.

We found such a moment in the little white-pillared Museum up the hill.
Accustomed as I was to vast and echoing mausoleums that went by the name
of Museum, grim and foreboding vaults of mustiness, this one-roomed
building in the form of a minute Roman temple, through the broad open
door of which the afternoon sun struck towards our feet, seemed the
friendliest place in Britain. It was a room in which one might forget
the world’s troubles for a while, forget even John Hawke and the insane
Jacko, and the many terrible problems they had brought into our lives.

And there we bent over the inscribed stones and the glass cases—gazing
at relics of those ancient days when Caerleon was _Isca Legionis_, and
when the proud Second Legion of Augustus built its fortress and city
there. _Isca Legionis_, where once King Arthur set up his golden turrets
and coloured banners, and gathered together his host of cavalry that was
to crush the flaxen-haired invader at the Battle of Badon. I thought, as
I stared at dagger-blades, sling-stones and ballista-balls, that this
little Museum perhaps held the secret of our national strength; the
essence, the core of our fighting-legend.

But Myfanwy would not let me drift away too romantically far. “Look,”
she said pointing, “what lovely brooches! All bronze, they are. And
those great heavy rings! What does it say? ‘Onyx’, ‘Cornelian’,
‘Jacinth’, ‘Chalcedony’. What lovely names! I’ll bet some young lady was
fond of those rings, eh Mr. Pablo?”

Pedro smiled thinly and said, “No doubt the centurions gave them to
local British girls in return for a breakfast of bacon and eggs.”

She smiled back at him roguishly and said, “I wish you were a centurion,
Mr. Pablo, then!”

Pedro shrugged and said sternly, “Who knows? Perhaps I was, once, long
ago. One can persuade oneself that one has been to places before,
especially when one is surrounded by such things as these, which bring
back so many half-forgotten emotions.”

Old Elwyn gave a little snort and said abruptly, “Look there, now! Over
three hundred coins, and some of them gold too. Dug up in Jenkin’s Field
and Myrtle Cottage, you know. I would like that lot set on a tablet in
my drawing-room. Make a nice decoration, it would, Myfanwy fach!”

Jenkin’s Field . . . Myrtle Cottage. . . . Such ordinary names again.
The dream had faded. Dai Lewis stood in the sunlight at the doorway and
said, “Come on, now, it looks as though the clouds are gathering over
there. We want to see the ruins before a storm starts.”

And so we went out into the street again and along a narrow lane, to the
open land above the little town of Caerleon.

Away to our right rose half-exposed walls and broken columns. In deep
ditches we saw tiles and pottery, left as it had been dropped nearly two
thousand years before.

Myfanwy said, “Come away—this is death. It is not like the pretty
rings. They are still alive. One could wear them now!”

As she spoke I felt a shudder move quickly up my back. _It is death_,
she had said. I recalled a shrieking ivory mask in the little Museum, a
small thing from one of the eastern islands, brought by some foreign
legionary, no doubt. There had been something I did not like in the set
of its open mouth, and its blank and empty eyes. It seemed to be calling
down an ageless curse upon all who visited the ruins. . . .

Dai said, “Look over there. That used to be an ancient British
settlement, a camp. They would look down here on the Romans and say what
they would do to them one day, when they could break in and catch the
Legion sleeping.”

I saw a lowering hill, a mile away, dark under the cloud bank now, with
the sun trying to fight its way across it towards us. The afternoon had
taken on a sombre tone suddenly.

Old Elwyn said a little grimly, “Aye, they may have threatened, but they
never _did_ break the power of Rome. Those hard-faced little soldiers
were too good for them.”

Myfanwy smiled and said, “You talk as though you were one of the Romans
and not one of the others, Da!” she said. “And in any case, how do you
know that we never broke the Romans down? This place lasted for three
hundred years and then fell into decay—but the Saxons didn’t do it.
They never dared come as far West as this. So who did do it?”

Dai said laconically, “Perhaps the Romans moved out because they
couldn’t stand the sound of the Welsh women’s tongues clacking all day
long.”

She began to chase her brother across the field, back to the path. We
followed them and then Pedro stood almost aghast at what we saw below
us.

“That place,” he said, pointing. “That is what I know. The scent of
something terrible comes back to me from that place. I know it as though
I had lived near it all my life.”

Hollowed out of the hillside was an oval arena, almost two hundred feet
in length, I would have guessed, and circled by a great mound of grey
stone blocks. Though the floor of the place was covered now by
close-cropped green turf, the dark and gnarled hawthorns that crouched
above it took away from it any air of gentleness. Along one rim of the
arena the sun threw a long shadow from the hunched rocks.

Pedro said, “The audience would pay more for their seats in the shade to
watch a man killed here. It is the same with us and the bulls.”

Old Elwyn said, “Once, they say, this wall was thirty feet high, and the
Amphitheatre held almost six thousand spectators. It would be a fine
sight, then, no doubt.”

I saw a little shudder pass over Pedro’s face. He was remembering the
little bull-rings in the sun where he had faced death many times in an
afternoon while the dark-faced villagers drank raw wine from goatskin
winebags and spat nutshells over the barrier, bored with waiting for
another’s death. . . .

Down below us, Myfanwy’s auburn head bobbed as she ran across the green
sward.

“Come on down, Mr. Pablo,” she shouted. “It’s smashing down here!”

He turned away suddenly, shaking his head like a man trying to free
himself from a ghastly trance.

“No, not even for you,” he said. “I would not go into that place of
death to-day.”

As we walked back down the hill towards the garage, Dai said earnestly,
“There’s a funny little place behind the wall, like a little chapel, you
know, and. . . .”

Pedro said absently, “There is a little altar stone in it. It is the
Shrine of Vengeance, I think. The gladiators would go in there and kneel
in the darkness and pray that the Goddess would bless their sharp knives
that afternoon. They would hope for a quick kill, one way or the other.”

Myfanwy said, “But how did you know, Mr. Pablo? You did not go down
there with us.”

Pedro passed his hand over his forehead. “I have been in other places
like that,” he said. “They are all the same. I do not think things have
changed much in two thousand years, the essential things of blood and
pain. They are always there, and the Goddess of Vengeance is always
waiting for a man’s prayers.”

Old Elwyn touched him on the shoulder, “What about a nice cup of tea,
lad,” he said. “You look depressed. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have
dragged you up there to see that old place!”

The thunder came just when we had got indoors, and then the rain began
to beat down as though it meant to punish us for the lovely summer we
had enjoyed.

Old Elwyn said, “I’ll just switch the six o’clock News on. It’ll pass
the time away till this storm’s passed over. It shouldn’t be long now;
there’s a streak of light over the hill already.”

I sat in that little room perspiring with anxiety. At last the
announcer’s cool voice came through, punctuated by the atmospheric
crackles of the storm.

“The police are still searching for the two gunmen who caused such a
disturbance in Cardiff last night. . . . It is thought that they might
still be in hiding, somewhere in the Cardiff area, since road-blocks
have so far produced no result, although all cars have been
searched. . . .”

Pedro lit another strong black cigarette and then looked the old man
straight in the eye. I felt that he was about to tell Elwyn Lewis what
had happened.

Dai was twisting and untwisting his tie, in an attitude of intense
anxiety.

Myfanwy suddenly switched the control knob over and the wireless set was
silent.

“How you can stand all that noise, I don’t know, Da!” she said. “When
there’s thunder about, I can’t bear all that crackling.”

Old Elwyn looked up at her. “What’s that, my love?” he said. “I’m afraid
I wasn’t listening. They’re always up to some nonsense or other in
Cardiff nowadays. I’m glad we left and came out here to peace and quiet.
No, I was just thinking that if I’d known, we wouldn’t have gone to the
Museum to-day. We’d have gone for a nice picnic in the Forest of Dean.”

Dai said, “What, and have got caught in this storm under all those oak
trees! Not on your life, Dad! Why, the lightning might’ve struck
Maggie!”

I looked through the long window towards the garage. Maggie stood in the
rain, her bashed and dented sides now gleaming with wet.

“She looks as though you’ve had her sprayed with cellulose, Dai,” I
said, to change the conversation.

He nodded. “When I get out of the Raff, I plan to get weaving on this
cellulosing lark. Dad won’t bother with it, but there’s a nice bit of
money to be made at it, I can tell you.”

“Money, money! That’s all you think of, money!” said Myfanwy, coming in
with the teapot.

I smiled ironically as I thought of the cheque that Doctor Phipps had
pushed across the table towards me—so many centuries ago! That
fantastic cheque, which might never now be mine!


                             _Twenty-nine_
                            The Storm Breaks

When the end came, it came suddenly, as though wishing to achieve with
one swift cut the undoing of a knot over which men had already spent too
much time.

We had sat through the evening with the light on, because of the
lowering sky, each one of us tensed up by the almost tangible electrical
atmosphere of the storm, until we felt we could bear it no longer.

Dai said, as though struck by a good idea of a sudden, “As soon as this
storm drops, let’s ride out to Tintern. It’ll be a change after that
Amphitheatre! And you chaps might like to find yourselves a pub to stay
in for a day or two.”

Myfanwy said, “Why, of all the ideas, Dai! You make it look as though
we’re turning them out! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, that you
should.”

Old Elwyn said, “She don’t want you to go, see. You’re a bit of company
for her, like. Not that I want you to go either, for that matter. But do
as Dai says by all means if you’d like to. You can always call back here
when you’ve seen what Tintern has to offer.”

Dai said, “Well, that’s settled then.” He breathed an audible sigh, as
though he was relieved that his plan should be working out so well, and
went out in the lessening shower to have a look at his car.

Suddenly Pedro said quietly to Myfanwy, “Would you mind walking with me
to the bridge? There is something I wish to say to you, something I
would like to tell you.”

His voice was so serious and urgent that the girl gazed up at him in
mild surprise and then, smiling gently, rose and followed him outside.

Old Elwyn took his pipe from his mouth and looked at me quizzically. “I
think that silly girl has taken a fancy to your friend,” he said
solemnly. Then his face relaxed and he went on, “I must say he’s a
well-set up young chap, and if they like each other, that’s their
affair, not mine. Come on, everybody else has gone out, we might as well
see what the weather’s like too.”

As we walked to the front of the garage and stood, looking at the dark
sky, with the petrol pumps behind us, I saw that Pedro and the girl were
leaning over the balustrade of the bridge, gazing down into the water.
Their heads were close together and their whispered voices came gently
back to us across the road. I saw that Pedro was stressing some point
with his hand and that Myfanwy was nodding, as though agreeing with him.
As she moved her head, her auburn pony’s tail bobbed up and down, giving
her much of the look of a little girl, shaking her plaits!

Away up the street, perhaps fifteen yards, Dai was sitting inside his
old car, Maggie, pressing the accelerator down and then releasing it,
again and again, as though listening for some defect. We were almost a
static group, a tableau, on the bridge at Caerleon in that moment. We
were temporarily at peace again.

Then, as we stood, a long green car came over the bridge, a Riley, low
and powerful. I had never seen the car before and so had no reason to
pay particular attention to it, or its driver. I just noticed that it
was mud-splashed, as though it had driven fast through the worst of the
storm, and that its bumper on the near side had been badly bent and
dented, as though the driver might have struck a wall as he turned
suddenly. And I put him down as a pretty reckless sort of chap, with no
respect for a fine piece of machinery.

I was about to say as much to old Elwyn, when so many things happened
that I had no time even to form the words for such a trivial message.

For the green car suddenly slowed down when it approached Pedro and the
girl, as they leaned on the grey stone coping, and, from the driver’s
side, I saw a sharp spurt of flame, and heard the stuttering report of
an automatic weapon. I even saw two chips of grey stone flick viciously
upwards into the air and disappear.

It was all so sudden that everything seemed to happen _at once_, without
any sequence. I think Myfanwy screamed, but I am not sure. I saw Pedro
stiffen strangely and then, almost with the same movement, swing round
to face the car, his arms widespread, so that he covered the body of the
girl.

Then the green Riley was alongside us, gathering speed, and I saw the
great hunched figure in the passenger’s seat seem to wave to us. His arm
came over, out of the window. And with horror I watched a small metal
ball, that glinted in the evening light, swing just over our heads, to
fall behind us.

I heard Elwyn Lewis call out sharply, “Myfanwy girl!” His eyes were wide
with fear. I flung him down sideways to the hard ground, trying to push
him away from the petrol pumps. And then the pavement beneath us seemed
to rock and a terrific blast of scorching vapour passed over us. My ears
were dulled and for a moment I thought I was blinded.

Yet it all happened within a small part of a second, this explosion, and
then I was rolling clear of the blazing pumps and the ruined garage,
dragging the old man’s limp body with me in terror.

And as my sight cleared I saw Dai’s eyes open in horror and his mouth
shouting, but I could not hear his words. I only knew that his old car,
Maggie, had leapt forward into the path of the green Riley. I saw it
meet the big car and then shoot back from it, crushed, to be flung
across the pavement and against the wall of a house.

I left the old man and ran towards the little car. Dai was not dead. He
flung open the smashed door and began to run crazily after the great
green car that now wobbled and swerved like a drunken thing, its
steering damaged from the crash.

I ran with him, instinctively, for I had seen Myfanwy break from the
wall of the bridge and run towards her father. I had seen Pedro on his
knees in the middle of the road, coughing and holding his chest with one
hand. And my deafened ears had suddenly come alive again to hear his
hoarse words, “_Por el amor de Dios, amigo. Muerte a Hawke! Muerte!
Muerte!_”

And I knew just enough Spanish to understand that. “Death to Hawke!
Death! Death!”

I did not stop to ask myself whether we could ever hope to catch the
murderous car, for though it was going slowly now, yet its speed was so
much greater than any we could have mustered. No, I followed Dai,
followed a friend whose vengeful anger gave him the strength and speed
of a hunting hound for the while.

And when the big car went out of sight round a corner, and Dai turned up
a small side street, I did not question his direction. Nor did I try to
shout to him, for from his sobbing grunts, I knew that he was now beyond
conversation of any sort.

And as we reached the top of the winding alley way, the car passed
across before us, for we had taken a short cut that must bring us into
line with it again.

Once more I saw that little Museum, with its white Roman pillars, though
now it glimmered at us from the dusk, and no longer smiled in the
sunshine. The great car roared past it and into the narrow lane which
led only to the ruins.

Dai stopped for a moment, ten yards before me, and flung up his arms in
a savage triumph, “Trapped, you swine! You’ve had it now!” he shouted,
and then began to run forward like a madman.

Before us the white moon rose, above the dark hills from which once the
Celt had looked across at the busy Roman builders, waiting, watching,
full of hatred.

A screech owl rose and fluttered away from us in sudden fear, crying
towards the moon. I ran after Dai, anxious not to lose him.


                                _Thirty_
                              Amphitheatre

What happened then was so terrible that even now I shudder when I think
of it.

Before me, along the slope, the green car swayed and lurched, with a
roaring of engine and a screaming of tyres. The road, such as it was,
had never been meant for any sort of wheeled traffic.

The headlamps had been switched on now, and swung dizzily from side to
side. Against their glow I could see Dai’s dark shadow always flitting
towards the car.

I think that Hawke must have seen him approaching too, for he suddenly
swung the wheel over, veering to the right, away from the narrow white
path. I heard the car crash through a wire fence, and then it was
bumping up and down, over heaps of debris left by the excavators, and
across deep ruts.

Then, in the powerful headlamps, I saw the machine head straight for a
grey stone wall, the wall of an ancient Roman shop, but right itself
before striking this obstacle and try to sheer away from it. John Hawke
drove like a maniac over the old site of the Legions, not knowing where
he was going, but anxious only to get away from the dark little shape
that raced after him, relentless as a hound on the scent.

But though the car swung round, it could not find the solid ground
again. The headlamps danced like immense fireflies, then the red tail
lights heeled over, and I heard a great crash and grinding of metal. The
hunched black shape of the Riley seemed to shrink, almost as though it
had dissolved into the earth. It had fallen, sideways, into the deepest
of the culverts, among the broken tiles and the fragments of
pottery—the rubbish of the Twentieth century alongside that of the
First. . . .

I heard Dai’s high voice once more, in a shout that bore only the
faintest resemblance to the utterance of a sane man. It was more like
that of his savage ancestors at that moment. And I saw him dash towards
the wrecked car. But as he approached it, another dark shape broke from
the wreckage and ran back across the road. Dai flung himself forwards
after that shape, his breath sobbing through the night, his feet
thudding on the damp ground like the muffled drums of doom.

By the car I stopped to regain my breath. I looked through the window
but could see nothing. Then I put my hand inside and felt for the light
switch. In its glow I could see that Giacomo had taken the full force of
that crash. His head hung on his chest as though his neck had been wrung
by a giant hand. I felt for his heartbeats and then I knew that there
was nothing I could do for him. Nothing anyone could do for him. On the
seat beside him lay the neat manilla envelope. I put it into my pocket.
Then I turned away and ran as quickly as I could after Dai. And as I
approached the great Amphitheatre, the moon came out full upon us,
lighting up the scene almost as brightly as when I had last seen it,
under the lowering clouds of afternoon, before the storm broke.

[Illustration]

Below me the smooth green sward stretched in an immense oval. I stood at
the top of the grey stone slope, among the crouched hawthorns, wondering
how best to get down. Then suddenly I knew that I had come too late to
do anything for anyone, even if I _did_ find my way among the many
shadowy obstacles of that place.

I saw John Hawke running across the arena, his moon-flung shadow long
beside him, like a lithe hunter. But this time it was the hunter that
was hunted, for not five yards behind him ran Dai, his heavy breathing
clearly audible from where I stood aghast.

I heard John Hawke call angrily over his shoulder, “Leave me, you fool.
Leave me. I do not wish to hurt you!”

And I heard Dai’s crazy high laugh as he still came on, his hands
outstretched to grasp the big man and drag him down in that place of
death.

And in the moonlight, that pitiless moonlight, I suddenly saw that Hawke
held the shining German automatic which he had once carried into the
shepherd’s hut, it seemed so long ago, the gun with which he had shot
Pedro down there on the bridge, to leave him a coughing ruin of a man.

I tried to warn Dai, to tell him that Hawke was still armed, but my
voice would not come into my throat. I could only gasp wordlessly.

Once more, as he ran, Hawke cried out, “I shall kill you, you fool, if
you do not leave me!”

Then, as I watched, I saw this scene as something older than us,
something as old as history. I saw Hawke as the foreign conqueror, and
Dai as the little vengeful Celt from the hills, and I sensed that they
were working out an age-old pattern that lay beyond all I was conscious
of.

And now Hawke had left the arena and had swung into a little square
stone annexe, from which I could see there was no escape, only back into
the Amphitheatre.

It was the Shrine of Vengeance, I saw with a shudder. And I think John
Hawke somehow sensed that too, for he turned and looked about him in the
moonlight and smiled coldly up towards me as I stood by the dark
hawthorn. I am certain that he saw me—saw me and smiled.

Then, with little Dai only a pace away from him, he raised the gun and,
almost leisurely, set it at his golden temples and fired, twice.

The shots re-echoed across that gaunt place. For a moment Hawke stood
swaying, with Dai gazing at him in the sudden shock of it all.

And then he seemed to shrink almost to nothing at Dai’s feet, to become
another shadow in the moonlight on the green carpet of that place of
death.

And, as I saw this, I suddenly found that the tears were running down my
cheeks, and that I was incapable of going down the slope, even to help
little Dai, who now staggered back towards me, his arms held wide open,
as though he walked in a blind dream.

As he reached me, I held out my hand to him, and then fell down, no
longer able to fight off the effects of that explosion.


                              _Thirty-one_
                                Epilogue

It was a pleasant October afternoon, but as I sat in the broad airy
waiting-room of the Monmouth General Hospital, I felt a cold chill of
doubt at what I might be told. Everyone seemed so impersonal here, so
wrapped in private hopes and fears. Even the clock seemed as though it
did not wish to commit itself; its hands were hardly moving.

As I let my mind wander away from this austere place, I thought again of
my own first day out of hospital . . . sitting in a deckchair on the
lawn, with my sisters fussing round me, bringing cushions and iced
lemonade. . . . Then the sound of a car on the drive and at last Doctor
Phipps standing before me, as grey as ever, but smiling like a boy as he
held out his delicate hand.

I took it with one almost as delicate, I shudder to say.

At first he seemed speechless. But when my young sister had made him sit
down, and had given him a lemonade with a long straw, he said, “Mr.
Frankland—my boy—I shall never be able to express our gratitude,
indeed, your country’s gratitude, for all. . . .”

I had to stop him then. I wasn’t strong enough yet to take that sort of
thing.

“He killed himself,” I said. “I didn’t do it. All I did was get myself
blown up. The others did everything.”

In his agitation, Dr. Phipps was trying to drink through a bent straw.
My young sister clucked and said, “I thought you were supposed to be
brainy. Here, have another.”

Phipps nodded and then went on, “I cannot discuss the matter any
further, my boy. The fact is, you were the necessary driving-force to it
all, the nucleus: you held it all together. We picked the right man, I
must say.”

I shut my eyes. I was too tired yet to discuss these things.

He sensed my feelings and stood up. “Have no fear, my boy,” he said
gently, “I understand more than you give me credit for. My committee
have sanctioned a substantial increase to the cheque I promised you,
and. . . .”

I sat up with a jerk of indignation.

“Too late,” he smiled, retreating across the lawn. “It’s already in your
Bank. There will be enough to share with Dai—and Pedro.”

“Come back,” I said. “I want to ask you something.”

He put on his hat. “Another time,” he said, “when you’re better. All you
need know is that there has been an act of intercession for him _at the
highest level_, my boy. And our mutual friend Joey, will give no more
trouble for at least twenty years. Good day to you.”

My young sister said, “Bats! Abso-jolly-lutely Bats!”

And suddenly I remembered Angela—the Girl Guide at Stratford.

That was the way she spoke, too. . . .

Then she said, “Now you’re so filthily rich, Bill, what about a new
fountain-pen and some mauve writing-paper?”

It was too much, in my weak state.

“Oh, go and—join the Girl Guides!” I said.

She danced round my deckchair like a horrible fairy.

“Too late! Too late!” she croaked. “I am already one!”

“I might have guessed it, you wretch,” I said. “All right, you shall
have your pen and paper. . . . But on one condition. . . .”

She had run whooping into the house before I could tell her the
condition. . . . And now I had forgotten what it was. . . .

In the chilly waiting-room of Monmouth General Hospital, I racked my
feeble brain, trying to remember what condition I had been about to lay
down that day to my unruly sister. . . . But it was impossible. . . .

“You’re getting to be a decrepit old so-and-so, Bill Frankland,” I told
myself, glancing up at the Hospital clock in case it had stopped after
all.

And then an Air Force Sergeant came smartly through the double doors,
smiling all over his dark face and holding out both hands towards me.

“Dai!” I said, “I’ll never be able to tell you how good it is to see you
again! And a full Sergeant too! Oh boy!”

He pumped my arm, until I pretended to threaten him with a left hook,
and then he sat down beside me on the bench, grinning happily.

“A lot can happen in two months, boy,” he said, as cocky as ever. “A lot
_has_ happened, anyway! After all those newspaper blokes wrote about me
smashing Maggie up on that green Riley, do you know what happened? Why,
the firm presented me with a new sports model! They said it wasn’t every
day one of their cars had a chance of fighting the Queen’s enemies,
like! A wizard little job it is too, Bill! I’ll let you drive her, one
day, when you’re down again—but woe betide you, and I mean it, if you
as much as scratch her! No Maggie tricks with Margaret! A real Group
Captain’s car she is, and no mistake!”

I touched his bright new tapes gingerly. “Talking about Group Captains,”
I said, “what about these? Have you signed on for ever?”

He shook his head and grinned, “Not bloomin’ likely,” he said. “I got
these by another fluke, boy. After that yarn you spun the papers that
night, about me being the Celt Incarnate, or some such, dragging down
the Foreign Power, my old C.O. got a bit breezy, thinking he hadn’t
recognized my worth enough in the past. I bet he thought the newspaper
boys would be round the camp, asking why I wasn’t a Warrant Officer—so
he made a special citation and pinned these on me, pronto!”

I said carefully, “And everything else? Is it all right?”

He almost laughed aloud, “Too good to be true, boyo,” he said. “The
Insurance are fixing a new garage and bungalow and Dad can hardly wait
to get out of Newport Cottage Hospital to see that the builders are
doing exactly what he ordered! His shock’s finished and the burns on his
back are next to right now. He sends his love and says he’ll give you a
tousling at dominoes when you get together again!”

There was a curious little pause then. I knew why he had stopped and
stared at me, so I told him the answer.

“Yes,” I said, “they’ve passed me fit for work again. No further danger,
if the doctor’s orders are obeyed! They got the hair to grow on the back
of my head again, which was a good thing. I’d have loathed to wear a hat
permanently after that petrol squirt! I hate hats!”

Dai said laughing, “Can’t get one to fit you now, eh boy?” Then he
looked serious for a moment. “You should have seen yourself, boyo,” he
said. “I never thought they’d get a man to look human again after
that—and you never seemed to notice it, what’s more, up there on the
hill.”

I said, “I think I was too angry, too scared and angry, to know what
_had_ happened.”

Dai said quietly, “But Dad knows, Bill bach. He’ll never forget, nor
shall we.” He paused, “What train have you got to take back to
Birmingham?”

I said, “The tea-time special, in an hour. I’ve got a job to do
to-night.”

“What,” he said, “catching some more spies, like?”

I smiled and shook my head, “Wrong this time, Dai bach,” I said. “No
more spies for me. I had the whole works this time and I’m satisfied!
No, I’m seconding a new welter-weight in the Birmingham inter-clubs
Championship.”

He said, “Phew, as though boxing hadn’t cost you enough!”

I said, “It was worth it. It gained me quite a few friends.”

Dai was strangely silent. Then he said, “I’m on leave for ten days. I’ll
get a chance to come here again. In any case, I only came to fetch
Myfanwy back home. She’s in with him now. Been every visiting day, she
has, since they let him see folk again.”

I said, almost afraid to ask, “How is she now, Dai? The bullets made a
bit of a mess, didn’t they?”

He laughed, as though I had made a joke. “Why, man,” he said, “those
doctors did a wizard job with it! You’d never notice, indeed you
wouldn’t. No more than vaccination marks, she says! If I tell you the
truth, she’d rather have ’em than not, since Dad and Pedro got a packet.
It’s in the family, like, then, you see. Share and share alike, you
know!”

It was only then that I dared ask him. “How is—he?” I said.

Dai’s laughter stopped for the first time. I could see then that it had
been a camouflage for his true feelings. He scratched his long Welsh
nose and looked away through the window for a moment. Then, as though
opening a new conversation, he said slowly, “They’ll let you see him,
after a longish journey, like.”

I said at last, “Is he changed much, Dai?”

The Sergeant’s eyes began to flicker a little and I saw him shut them
tight a time or two. “Blast this weather,” he said. “It gives me
migraine. Can’t hardly see sometime, bach, you’d never credit it. What
did you say? I didn’t catch it.”

I said, “It doesn’t matter, Dai. I’ll go in and see him myself if
they’ll let me.”

And then the high cream-painted door opened and a Sister came through.
Myfanwy was with her. She smiled to see us and pushed a handkerchief
away quickly into her handbag.

“Well there,” she said, with a marked Spanish-American accent. “Hiya,
Bill! Fancy you getting along here after all that!”

“I’ve been trying for some time, Myfanwy,” I said. “Only they kept
holding me down. If I’d had my right arm out of bed, I’d have shown
’em!”

She placed her hand lightly on my arm and said, “Come down to Caerleon
again, as soon as you can. We’ll put you up if it’s only in the
builders’ cabin!”

Then she and Dai smiled and the Sister clucked impatiently. “If you wish
to see Mr. Moreno,” she said, “you must hurry. I can’t have his
afternoon rest disturbed at this stage.”

I followed her into the Ward annexe, half-afraid to keep up with her
quick steps. I noticed that there were pink flowers on a little white
table, and that the wireless was playing softly, some Continental music
that seemed strangely out of place there.

I noticed also that there was a white screen round the bed.

And then, when I was so fearful that I had almost asked to be taken out
of the Ward again, I saw a thin spiral of deep blue smoke rising slowly
over the screen! Thank goodness Pedro could smoke, I thought.

I almost ran forward then. “His little privilege,” the Sister said
severely. “Now don’t tire him. I shall give you twenty minutes and then
I shall come and kick you out. He _must_ have his sleep if he is to get
well again.”

I heard her feet clicking across the wooden flooring and then I dared to
go quietly round that white screen.

Pedro Moreno lay still on his pillow, his eye closed, his strong face
thin and drawn, and very pale. He seemed to have got so much smaller
than when I last saw him. There was a bandage covering one side of his
face. His once-black hair was almost as grizzled as that of old Elwyn
Lewis. I did not know in what words I ought to address him.

But his one visible eye opened suddenly. It was as dark and piercing as
ever. A strange wry smile creased his pallid features and he held out
his hand, his left hand, towards me stiffly.

As I took it, I felt the strength of the man coming back into the frail
hand, his left one in my right.

He said, “It’s got to do for two now, amigo Bill.”

Then I noticed the bandaging on his right shoulder and I knew what had
happened when Hawke’s heavy calibre bullets had whined their way across
the narrow bridge that night.

Pedro said, in something a little above a whisper, “No more bulls and
guitars for me, hombre. But they tell me there’s a chance of me getting
British nationality—Myfanwy has been bullying some M.P. or other—and
now I’ll look the part—like your Nelson, eh? One eye, one arm! Just the
job!”

I said, “You’re a tough guy, Pedro. I take my hat off to you, amigo.”

He shrugged with his eyebrows because he could not do it with his
shoulder any more.

“Sure,” he said, nonchalantly, “sure, it was tough. These things are,
like anything else is. But that’s over now, boy. I look at it this way;
once I used to say I’d give my right arm for John Hawke. Well, that’s
just what I did—and so the debt’s settled with a clear conscience. I
can start to _live_ again now, amigo!”

I looked at his frail body, outlined in the hospital sheets, and that
pale face.

“What will you do?” I said, as ordinarily as I could make myself speak.

He looked at me shrewdly. “I can sell car-parts and petrol with one arm
as well as you could with two, I guess. Dai and I have plans for that
garage when he gets out of the Air Force next year, I can tell you.
Things will hum in old Caerleon, Bill.”

I didn’t dare look at him when I spoke again.

“Look, Pedro, there’s something I want to ask you. It’s almost a favour,
in a way, and I wouldn’t like you to take it wrong.”

He waited for me to go on and then said drily, “Well, Bill, and what is
there about me now to scare anybody?”

I said, “Well, there’s a bit of money I’d like to spread around, to
invest, you understand.”

The music from the Continental station droned on sleepily and a woman
singer sang another verse about a village merry-go-round. The big white
antiseptic clock on the far wall beat out three centuries. Rome rose and
fell and so did the Colossus of Rhodes. Then the Eiffel Tower got itself
built.

At last in a queer dry voice that came from the outermost planet in
space, Pedro said, “So they paid you off for what you did to Hawke,
after all?”

I nodded. “For what we _all_ did to Hawke,” I said. “That’s why it’s got
to be shared out, if we are to get anything good out of it. I took the
liberty of visiting old Sam, the shepherd who let us ruin his home, last
week. He’s got his share. He sends his thanks to you for the knives and
forks, though he says he never uses forks.”

Pedro said, “Light a cigarette for me, Bill. Don’t strike the match too
hard or Sister will hear. She allows me only one an hour.”

I did as he said. Then he eased himself over and said, “How are those
little pups Nell had got that night we were there? I’d certainly like
one of those little pups.”

I said, “That sort of dog grows into a very big fellow in two months and
over. They are all away to various farms now, Pedro, no doubt rounding
up the sheep on their own account!”

He thought for a while, then said, “My, but life just goes on and on,
boy! There’s no stopping it, is there!”

I said, “No, there’s no stopping it, amigo. What about that money? It’s
waiting for you to get better.”

Pedro said, “Yes, I reckon we’ll need it if I go into the motor
business! I’d sooner bust ’em than mend ’em! Look, Bill, we’ll have that
money on one condition—that the new firm gets to be LEWIS, FRANKLAND
and MORENO. Okay?”

I shook his left hand again. “From to-day,” I said, “I’m in the car
business, so help me! I’ll leave my dry Mycenean bones in Birmingham at
week-ends and sell the odd gallon of petrol and a sparking-plug in
Caerleon. Will that suit?”

Pedro smiled and said, “Don’t bother with trains, amigo. They always go
on strike. You told me so, one bright morning. Look, Myfanwy and I will
fetch you in a little Jaguar we are getting when I finally dodge away
from this haven of rest.”

I hadn’t dared to ask that particular question. Now I touched him on the
shoulder. “Congratulations, amigo,” I said. “When is the happy day to
be?”

His drawn face wrinkled into a smile. “Gently, gently,” he said. “We
sober Spaniards take longer about such things than you hot-blooded
English, you know!”

He stopped then and made a little motion towards his head. Then he
smiled helplessly and said, “Will you feel under my pillow, Bill? I
can’t reach it with this hand. There’s something there I was keeping for
you to see. You are the first, even before Myfanwy. I met her because of
you.”

I did as he said, and drew out a little red box. At his nod I opened it.
On its black velvet cushion lay a magnificent gold ring, its rich metal
coiled in heavy Celtic ornament. At its centre gleamed a deep Cornelian.
He was looking up at me in pleasure.

I said, “But this is terrific! It’s like the one we saw in the little
Museum, that day—only better!”

He lay back slightly and said, “That was the idea, amigo—just the idea.
And I’d love to be able to tell you the trouble it caused Sister to draw
it on a piece of paper at my direction, when I didn’t feel so well you
know, so that the goldsmith could do his stuff!”

I visualized this strange hard man, lying near to death and forcing a
tired Sister to do what seemed to her a crazy thing, for a girl whose
life he had saved, and of whom he was so fond though he had known her so
short a time.

He sighed and his eye closed. He spoke like a man in a dream. “Now I can
show it to her and we can get engaged. I think she likes me a
bit—though why she should care for a wreck like me, I wouldn’t know. Do
_you_ know, amigo?”

I said, “Yes, Pedro Moreno, I think I know, boy.”

He shrugged his dark eyebrows again and said, “You British are crazy.”
Then his pale lips curled in a smile.

I said, “Yes, and you’ll make a pretty good addition to the crazy gang,
yourself, amigo.”

But he did not answer, though he still smiled quietly. Then I knew that
he was asleep. I turned the radio down and stubbed out the cigarette
that still dangled from his hand and went quietly round the white
screen. Sister was just coming to call me away.

Outside it was raining gently from a light sky. The streets seemed fresh
and clean, and there was hope in the air.

True enough, I thought, every year Winter has to come—but how splendid
that makes the Spring which follows it!

                                THE END




                           TRANSCRIBER NOTES

    Illustrations are not included in this ebook due to copyright
    considerations.

    Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where
    multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

    Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer
    errors occur.

    Book name and author have been added to the original book cover.
    The resulting cover is placed in the public domain.

    [The end of _Hunter Hunted_ by Henry Treece]