Pursuit of Arms

by Gerald Hammond

  One of these brought him to his brother-in-law’s home. He found Ronnie in the kitchen.

  “Where’s Butch?” Keith asked.

  Ronnie had been dripping sweat into a pan of sausages but he abandoned the effort. “If I knew that,” he said, “d’you think I’d be wasting my time trying to remember how to cook? Come away teen and have a beer.” He dropped the charred mess into the sink and led Keith through into the living room which Janet and Molly had decorated and to which Butch had added her own touches. As a setting for the rough-hewn stalker it always seemed to Keith as appropriate as a lace frill round a manhole-cover. Ronnie hunted in a veneered cocktail cabinet and found tins of beer. “I’ve not clapped eyes on her since the afternoon of the day before yesterday.”

  This was what Keith had come to find out. “That would be when you brought her up to date, the way I told her you would?”

  “Aye. Now that her guns are here and she’s got you to deal with them, maybe she’s had all that she wants from me. It didn’t seem that way but, with women, who can tell?”

  “Amen,” Keith said. He shifted in his chair and wished that Ronnie had been left to choose his own furnishings. Women, with their less weighty shoulders, can be comfortable in a chair that crucifies a man.

  “Did they find all her guns in the trailer?” Ronnie asked.

  “Her crates were all there and untouched. Butch came into the station last night and we opened them up for her.”

  “It’s a wonder she didn’t come in by. I’ll tell you this, Keith man, and don’t you go telling Molly. I’m sair worried. There’s been women have come and gone in my life, sometimes not much of a loss and sometimes a damned good riddance. But this one’s special. Some of her clothes is still here, but I’m awful feared that some day I’ll come home and find they’re gone. If it’s all done, surely the least she could do is to tell me?”

  Keith had never seen his rough-hewn brother-in-law so close to tears. He was moved to pity. “If it was over,” he said, “she’d do that. Don’t worry, she’ll turn up. She’s probably in work and sent you a message that you didn’t get. Come out to us for a dram and a meal about this time tomorrow and if she’s still adrift we’ll sort it out. Good God, after getting Deborah and a couple of tons of small-arms and ammunition back from an armed gang, one small, Polish ballerina shouldn’t be much of a problem. Did you have a chance to look round Lairy Farm in daylight?”

  Their conversation moved away from the disquieting absence of Butch although Keith could tell that Ronnie’s thoughts were still with the missing dancer.

  *

  From Ronnie’s home, Keith headed eastward out of the town and then turned south. He passed Deer Hill and entered an area that was off his usual track. He tried several casts along narrow, half-forgotten roads that laced the farmland, going almost nowhere. The telephone directory had given him a clue. He could have telephoned to ask for directions, but between innate discretion and over-confidence in his sense of direction, he had not.

  He found it at last, and it was just as he had thought he remembered. A sign-board, once bright with primary colours but now dulled with age and almost lost in a sprouting hedge. It said ‘Springbrae Stables’, and underneath in smaller lettering, ‘Prop: J.Batory’.

  “Ha!” Keith said. He swung in through the gateway.

  Ponies and horses were grazing lazily in two large paddocks shaded and sheltered by established woodland. The stable-block and the house seemed deserted but, from a small cottage which seemed to have been dropped behind the stables as an afterthought or by accident, a middle-aged woman in jodhpurs emerged in response to a toot on his horn. They met at the corner of one of the paddocks.

  “Hullo,” Keith said. He invested the word with all the warmth he could project.

  “Good evening.” The lady seemed unimpressed. Her voice was Anglicised Scots and peevish. “Did you want something?”

  “I wanted to ask about riding lessons for my daughter.”

  The woman pulled a crumpled broadsheet out of her hip pocket and pushed it at him. “This will tell you our terms. But as for making an appointment, you’ll have to speak to Mr Batory. The phone number’s on the letterhead.”

  “Your charges seem reasonable,” Keith said. He decided to probe a little further. “Couldn’t you look in the book and make an appointment for me?”

  “No, I could not,” she snapped. “I’m supposed to be the secretary as well as the stable-person and general gopher. But nobody tells me what’s going on around here any more. I can’t help you.” She clamped her lips shut in a vicious little line.

  She was helping him more than she knew.

  “Where would I find Mr Batory just now?” Keith asked.

  “I’m not his keeper.”

  “Of course not. But I’m going away for a few days and my wife hates being left to make arrangements.”

  She hesitated, but feminist sympathies won the day. The man must never be hindered from shouldering his proper burdens. “He spends most evenings in the Polish Club in Newton Lauder,” she said reluctantly.

  “In Bank Street?”

  “I expect so. If you see him, you might ask whether we’re opening for business tomorrow. It would be nice to know.”

  Keith looked around. He was seeing the sunshine today, it seemed, for the first time. “It’s a lovely place,” he said. “Your horses look well-kept. You’ve just the fourteen?”

  “That’s the lot. And poor old Caesar — the big roan — he’s been lame for the last fortnight. We’ll get by for now, but if Caesar isn’t fit by the start of hunting proper we’ll be short.”

  Keith drove away grinning.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Keith knew where to find the Polish Club. A former lady-friend had lived nearby and he had noticed the plate without paying it any attention. He parked some distance away, in case some prowling reporter should recognise his car, and walked.

  The club occupied what had once been two flats at the top of a mellowed, stone-built tenement block. The door was between two shops. Keith paused on the threshold. He wondered whether he was ready for any kind of confrontation. His thoughts were only beginning to come together. Yet he could make no more progress without asking questions, and time might only scatter the loose threads to where he could never catch them up again. He took a deep breath and went in.

  The severe but well-kept stair climbed past flats labelled Kubicki and Tobiczyk. Evidently the block had become a Polish enclave. At the top was a single door, its blue paint almost concealed by notices insisting that the club was private, that non-members were never admitted and that those wishing to join should seek an appointment by telephone.

  He tried the door. It was stiff but unlocked. The club’s management must have felt that the inhospitable notices were protection enough.

  As he climbed, Keith had been aware of a rhythmic vibration which pulsed through the fabric of the building. From the landing, he could hear faint music; but as he entered the club the volume rose and he could hear voices and make out the tapping of many feet. He followed the noise to another door and pushed it open, to be met by tobacco-smoke, a blast of heat and noise and the smell of mixed alcohols.

  He had found the main clubroom, two rooms thrown together but still too small for the crowd of about twenty men, most of them elderly, who were packed sociably inside. There was a small bar, squeezed into a corner like a stranger at a feast.

  Four of the tables had been pushed together in the middle of the room and on this precarious stage, her head dangerously near the ceiling, was Butch. She was the only woman in the room and Keith thought that she was very conscious of it. She wore a costume which Keith half recognised, half guessed to be Polish and she was dancing. Her dance might also have been Polish and traditional, but he thought that she was improvising within the framework of a traditional style. The dance expressed triumph and yet there was sadness to be seen in it. Butch was an artist.

  She was the first to see Keith.
She froze. The stamping of feet died slowly away. Only the music throbbed on until somebody stopped the tape. Through the silence, Keith heard whispers and his own name. He had time to recognise several customers of the shop and the saddler who stitched old gun-cases for him.

  “I knocked and knocked,” Keith said, “but I couldn’t make myself heard above the music.”

  A room full of men can never be quite silent and yet its silence can seem much deeper than that of an empty room. Keith could hear the beat of his own heart and the hiss of the blood in his ears. Then Butch stooped to put a hand on the shoulder of the nearest man and jumped lightly down from the table. She squeezed her way towards Keith. She was smiling, but with an effort.

  “The wean,” she said. “How is she, after her bad time?”

  “Bruised,” Keith said. “Nothing worse.”

  “Is good. I prayed for her.”

  Keith felt uncomfortable. He had not thought to try prayer. “We want to take her mind off it,” he said. “I came to ask whether you’d give her dancing lessons.”

  “Happily,” she said. “Any time.”

  The question and answer — unexpected even by Keith, who had been impressed by the excellence of the idea even as he heard himself uttering it — seemed about to relax the tension in the room. But a stocky man in his fifties, with the kind of knobbly and high-cheekboned face which Keith thought of vaguely as being Baltic or Slav, had risen and pushed his way to Butch’s elbow. He was gripping an old revolver without seeming quite sure what to do with it. Keith took several seconds to recognise it.

  The feeling in the room was hostile again. Keith realised that they were waiting for him to speak. He also realised that he might have put his head into the mouth of a very unpredictable lion. His own mouth was dry.

  Say something irrelevant, he told himself, while they settle down. “I wouldn’t use that thing if I were you,” he said. His voice seemed to have gone up in pitch. “It must be as old as you are and they never were much good anyway. On the other hand, the Radom factory never made many of them before they switched to a version of the Browning. A collector of early revolvers would probably pay over a hundred quid for that one, which would buy you something more serviceable.”

  The man said a few words in what Keith assumed was Polish and gestured with the muzzle of his revolver. There were a few nods but also murmurs of disquiet.

  Butch, who was indisputably their leader, silenced him with a word. For Keith’s benefit she switched to her own quaint pidgin-Scottish. “Do not be fiel, Jan,” she said. “If he knew nothing, you tell him muckle by showing that thing. If he knew muckle before he come, Mr Calder is too canny to come without telling his friends.” Jan would have spoken again but she rode him down. “Enough,” she snapped. “Sit down. You also sit,” she told Keith. “Sit and drink and talk.” And she rounded on a small man near the door. “Why was door not locked? You go and fix.”

  Somebody moved to a bench to free a chair for Keith. Jan resumed his seat at the square of tables and laid the revolver in front of him. Butch took the only armchair, which seemed to have been brought from somebody’s parlour to act as a throne. In this company, she was a queen. “Now,” she said, “tell us why you come.”

  “I wanted to see you,” Keith said. “And I wanted to find Mr Batory.”

  Jan smiled grimly. “You found me,” he said.

  In for a penny, Keith thought, in for a pound. “I know what you did two nights ago,” he said.

  There was a brief sibilance as a dozen men drew breath together.

  “When you find out this?” Butch asked.

  “Let me put it this way,” Keith said. “I could very easily have told the police before I came here, but I didn’t. I don’t need to tell any of you about what happened the night before last. I rescued my daughter and that was the only thing which mattered. The capture of the criminals, the recovery of the guns, the fact that some of the guns have vanished, all those things were incidental. They still are.

  “But when I had time to think, I guessed what had happened. And I came here tonight because we still have business to do and I like to know who I’m doing business with. So I want to know why.”

  “Tell us how you know, and when,” Butch said.

  “And then you’ll tell me what I want to know?”

  “Perhaps. First, you talk.”

  “Very well,” Keith said. “When the guns were recovered, eleven cases were missing from the middle of the trailer, through a hole in the roof. The police were given information suggesting that the smaller theft had happened before the load ever reached Newton Lauder. This, for me, doesn’t ring true. No doubt the police would think the same. But because they can’t believe that the guns could have been taken from the trailer while the rescue was going on, and in the presence of a Special Branch officer who desperately wanted them back, they’re forced to act on the assumption that those witnesses were telling the truth. Can I take it that those witnesses were put up to it by yourselves?”

  “No questions yet,” Butch said.

  Somebody had put a drink in front of Keith and he took a sip. It tasted like bottled flames faintly flavoured with tonic water, but he scarcely noticed.

  “I looked down from the main road,” he said. “I saw what must have been the vehicle carrying the guns as it approached Newton Lauder. If there had been a hole in its roof, I’d have seen it. But I haven’t told the police. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Go on,” Butch said.

  “Unlike the police, I was prepared to believe that the trailer could have been robbed again while my rescue was going on nearby. It was dark. Deliberately, we were making enough noise to have drowned a brass band. It could have been done. But it would have needed some prior organisation. How could whoever-it-was have known that I would create an opportunity for them in that time and place and manner? We had been as secretive as we possibly could so as not to endanger the hostages. Anybody watching us might have guessed that something was up; but by the time they could have known the details, it would have been too late.

  “Then Molly said —”

  “Molly is his wife,” Butch put in. The whole room was listening intently. The hostility was fading. Another drink appeared in front of him.

  “— said something which reminded me that, because your antique guns were also on the lorry, I had told my wife’s brother to keep you informed. He is a professional stalker and better at reading the signs than the police are. I asked him to look around the farm. The ground is very hard and dry. He could make out nothing in the stubbles, but in the grass he found some vague marks. None that he could swear weren’t made by cattle, but they were very blurred. That made me think of horses with padded hooves and taped harnesses, perhaps given tranquillisers to reduce the risk of a sudden whinny, coming in across the farmland.

  “So somebody knew our plans. Somebody Polish. And I remembered seeing a sign-board at the local stables with the proprietor’s name on it. A Polish name. I also remembered that a contingent of Poles had been stationed near here during the war. After the war, none of them wanted to return to a Poland under Russian domination and some of them settled in the neighbourhood. Many of those were ex-cavalrymen.

  “I have just counted your livestock, Mr Batory. Fourteen, including two Shetland ponies which would be too small for such a job, and the big roan which is lame. That leaves eleven. Twenty-two cases went missing. Two to a horse or pony — the logical way to load them.

  “Then again, there’s the hole in the roof of the trailer. It would have been easier and quieter to force the back doors, but that would only have exposed the antique guns, which had been loaded last. There would have been no point in your stealing the antiques which would come back to Miss Baczwynska anyway.

  “And then, to dispel my last doubts if I had any, I come along here and find you in the middle of a celebration.

  “You shouldn’t have got away with it. If I may say so, you Poles are impetuous; and the plan must ha
ve been scrambled together in a hurry. Yet it seems to have gone smoothly, with one exception. You knew that I had sent a man with a rifle and night-sight up the hill, to keep watch in case of surprises. You had to neutralise him, so one of you crept up on him and held a gun, or what purported to be a gun, to his back.

  “That fact should have alerted the police, and if they had investigated quickly with it in mind they would have found the marks in the grass. They would have found your horses resting after a night of hard work. But the only policeman who knew about the man on the hill was the Special Branch officer who had been on the spot. He would very much prefer that the guns had been taken before the lorry reached Newton Lauder. So he said nothing.”

  Jan Batory grunted suddenly. “You think you know it all,” he said. “But none of this is proof.”

  “Of course not,” Keith said. “And in a few days, all the small clues which might have furnished proof will have gone.”

  “So what you want from us?” Batory asked. “Money?”

  “Not unless I earn it,” Keith said. “I want to know more. I want to know why. At the moment I can only guess. I want to be sure. So that I know what to do.”

  There was a murmur of concern in the room and then silence again. They waited. Even dressed as a peasant, Butch dominated the room. She decided.

  “It can do no harm now,” she said. And she looked at Keith. “Those guns are gone and can not be recovered. If I tell you why, maybe you will understand and help us.

  “You hear of Solidarity?”

  “The union? Yes, I know of it.”

  “Why you smiling?” she demanded.

  Keith wiped the smile off his face. He had offended. “I was pleased that I’d guessed right,” he said.

  “Was more than that. You think Solidarity is funny?”