The Secret Vanguard

by Michael Innes

  ‘Listen:

  Where the westerly spur of the furthermost mountain

  Hovers falcon-like over the heart of the bay,

  Past seven sad leagues and a last lonely fountain,

  A mile towards tomorrow the dead garden lay.

  Evans frowned. ‘It needs a starting point,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose so.’ She looked at him appraisingly in the cold light. ‘You’re quick on the uptake,’ she added.

  ‘Say?’

  She smiled. ‘Yours isn’t the only variation on the English language. But go on.’

  ‘The poem is just accurate directions for finding the dead garden, whatever that may be. But it needs a starting point. If you know where you are to begin with, then the westerly spur and the heart of the bay will give the line you want… This stuff was passed under someone’s nose on the train – is that it?’

  ‘I think that was it.’ And Sheila gave a brief account of what had happened.

  Evans nodded. ‘It makes sense,’ he said. ‘In a Pickwickian or European use of the word, that’s to say.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sheila meekly.

  ‘A smart way of going about something plumb crazy. This Pennyfeather was being trailed – or thought he was being trailed – mighty close by the sandy-haired fellow. He had to pass his information on, and Dousterswivel was there to get it. But time must have been a pressing factor when they risked a trick like that.’

  ‘That’s what I think.’ Sheila looked troubled. ‘And the whole thing may be frightfully important.’

  ‘Our business is a getaway. Then we’ll find that policeman and let him figure it all out – nice problem for a Highland cop.’

  ‘I’m not feeling altogether like that.’

  ‘Ah.’ He looked at her in obscure calculation. ‘You’ll be missed?’

  ‘Yes. I was going to cousins beyond Drumtoul. They knew I was on the train.’

  ‘But this poetry business: nobody knows of that except you and me?’

  ‘No – yes. I telephoned when I’d arrive from Perth. And I made a joke of it. They asked me about the journey and I said I was travelling with the shade of Swinburne and he was extemporizing on his Forsaken Garden. I don’t know if they even got it; it was a silly thing to try putting across on the telephone – just something to say.’

  Evans nodded. ‘It will take a clever cop to make much of it. And now we’d better quit. We can make all the running, in a way. Scotland’s all round us and these folk can’t be that. Only I’m wondering if we hadn’t better wait for the letter-carrier and the milk. We might gain–’ He stopped and laid a hand on Sheila’s arm. ‘Get down,’ he whispered.

  They crouched down. From somewhere in the shifting curtain of mist before them had come a little rattle of falling stones. Perhaps a sheep, Sheila thought – and suddenly felt her heart pound within her. For out of the mist there had emerged, enormous, the figure of a man. He advanced slowly up the path, shrinking oddly as he did so to a natural size. ‘Why,’ whispered Sheila with relief, ‘it’s only an old shep–’ Evans’ hand closed like a vice on her arm.

  An old man, bearded, in patched lovat tweed, over his shoulder a plaid, in his hand a crook that might have come straight out of the Old Testament…he trudged up the path towards the croft and disappeared within. And a voice breathed in Sheila’s ear. ‘You see that flat slab? I want him there. When he comes out give a hail. But don’t show yourself.’ She turned her head. Evans was gone.

  It was very still. Far away she could hear mountain sheep faintly bleating. Momentarily the mist thickened and the white walls of the croft faded; only the doorway was a low pool of darkness. Something stirred in it. He had come out. The mist cleared and she saw him clearly – his crook was gone and he stood erect and alert, listening, one hand in the pocket of his patched coat.

  Sheila called out. ‘Hoy!’

  He turned instantly towards the sound and rapidly advanced. Too far to the right… Sheila crouched low and ran. ‘Shepherd!’ He turned again and advanced unerringly. He was halfway towards her when he threw his arms strangely above his head and fell. An ugly fall, such as she had never before seen. She closed her eyes…

  ‘All right, Sheila.’ Evans was kneeling over his quarry.

  She went forward. ‘However–’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you I was crazy on Caravaggio’s David? I practised with the regular sling for years the same as most boys do with a sling-shot. And with shoestrings and a bit of leather what more does one want? This gives us perhaps another hour. Wait.’ He got up and ran into the croft.

  Sheila studied the fallen man. He was a figure of patriarchal dignity and quite unconscious; from a long gash on his temple blood slowly trickled down his beard… Evans was beside her again with a pannikin and a length of rope. ‘He delivered your milk,’ he said curtly. ‘Drink it up.’ Sheila looked from the wounded head of the old man – he appeared really to be that – to the pannikin, and from the pannikin to Dick Evans. Perhaps this blood business had turned him primitive; the thing could be divined as a species of ordeal or test. She sat down and drank the milk – rather slowly. By the time she had finished half of it Evans and the problematical shepherd had disappeared. So had the rope.

  ‘A shepherd at all points’ – Evans had appeared again in the doorway – ‘except that he had a gun.’ With curious diffidence he held out an automatic pistol. ‘Do you know’ – he looked at her positively warily – ‘I’ve never handled one of these things?’

  For the first time in an unknown number of hours Sheila laughed outright. ‘Why ever should you have – particularly when you’re so handy with shoelaces and tobacco pouches? But stick it in your rucksack; it may be useful all the same. And drink your milk.’

  He drank. ‘And now we’re quitting. Our friend came up the path; we’ll go dead the other way. Over this moor for a good bit and then find a burn and follow it down. That will get us within hail of your policeman if we’ve any luck.’

  ‘I want to go down the path.’

  Evans stopped in the act of putting on his rucksack. ‘Don’t you see you have what may be valuable information? Your job’s to get it safe to your own base.’

  ‘But we’re lord knows where. And there’s that element of time: you say this is our second day here. I want to go down the path.’

  ‘You know what this is? It’s some two hundred million people crouching ready to cut each other’s throats. And you want to walk right in between.’

  ‘But, Dick, that’s not quite right. I’m one of the two hundred million–’

  Dick Evans’ lips appeared to be framing the words ‘I’m not.’

  ‘–and so it’s less simple for me than for you.’

  He was suddenly indignant. ‘Look here, that flag-waggy line of talk–’ He stopped and looked down the path. It wound into mist and its end was utterly unknown. He frowned and stretched his arms – stretched them as if there lay some puzzle in his being able to do so. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Come along.’

  They descended cautiously together.

  9: Sheila in Search of Scotland

  ‘It’s a long way,’ said Sheila. ‘Seven sad leagues, I mean. Twenty-one miles. I don’t see that to anything so far away as that, the spur and the heart of the bay can be a very accurate pointer.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Evans was peering intently ahead. His voice, Sheila thought, was faintly mocking.

  ‘But perhaps if they were both in the distance–’

  ‘You’ve got it.’ He nodded quickly. ‘The leagues are from where you stand. The bay is some way off and the spur of the mountain is much farther. Given that and a little careful mapwork, you could arrive at a fairly small area as containing the last lonely fountain. What do you make of it?’

  ‘Not the sort of thing that spouts in a garden. Jus
t a spring, I imagine; the highest spring to which you can trace some stream. What about “tomorrow”? “A mile towards tomorrow the dead garden lay.”’

  Evans did not immediately reply. He had paused to listen and now he lay down and put his ear to the ground. ‘Nothing,’ he said softly, and rose. ‘Where is tomorrow, Sheila: east or west?’

  ‘East, I think. Every tomorrow comes from there.’

  ‘But the new world is in the west. There’s a sense in which tomorrow lies towards the sunset. Not that our friends would be likely to see it that way. German thought – and there’s a lot of it – tends to see the unexhausted world-views in the east.’

  Sheila cautiously negotiated a steep turn in the path. ‘What an odd time for a lecture out of Spengler, Dick Evans.’

  They laughed together – but awkwardly, as if this discovery of a common learning suggested all of the other that lay unknown to each. ‘Well,’ said Evans practically, ‘find the last lonely fountain and it’s only a short march either way.’ He laid a hand on her arm. ‘Smoke!’

  The smell – faint, acrid, sudden – halted them like a traffic light. And in the same moment the mist parted as if at the stroke of a great sword, parted in two uncertain ranks which were presently split and split again, harried and broken and swept from the field by an invisible cavalry of the air. The transformation had the speed of good theatrical machinery; Sheila and Evans had barely dropped to cover when the last wisps curled within themselves and vanished, revealing in the distance a prospect of sullen and solitary grandeur and, hard in the foreground, a solid, silent house.

  A sinister house. Instinctively Sheila crouched lower, digging her elbows into the drag and give of the heather where it twisted toughly near the root. The house was sinister not because thus encountered in the middle of a wild adventure; it was sinister in terms of those obscure memory-traces which are at work when one loves or hates at first sight. She tried to think this out. A large house with a square tower; the walls of the sort of rough-cast which in Scotland is called harl; the tower, however, rising to a system of battlements and overhanging turrets in grey stone. Her conscious mind struggled with the problem. There was often something subtly alien about houses which the wealthy put up for their recreation in this stern and barren country. And the house now before her was a bogus version of that again. It was like the man she had called Burge and later Dousterswivel – sinister because in the wrong place. For the house stood in the middle of nowhere, and with nothing but a faint track leading to it through the heather. And a house of this sort – the genuine slightly alien, English thing – would have plantations, a garden, some sort of drive. Or it would be smaller and stand near a river or stream. Searched, her memory told her so much.

  This house was sinister because in the wrong place. And that – despite Dick Evans’ rational sense of the plumb craziness of the game – was why Dousterswivel had to be resisted, had to be resisted personally, immediately, head on. A foreign officer whose heels clicked ironically in the darkness of a Highland railway station, he was profoundly in the wrong place. The follies of governments, the obsoleteness of controlling minds, the responsibility which two hundred million people bore for letting such control be: all these things were but a difficult penumbra round an immediate situation which was mercifully simple and clear. The activity upon which she had stumbled on the Forth Bridge was something to smash if smash it she could. For it was a challenge to the very soil on which she lay. And she turned her head and whispered, ‘It’s them, Dick. I know it is.’

  He nodded, as if taking her word for it; his glance was not on the house, but was going carefully over the whole terrain which the dispersing mist had revealed. Their route from the croft must have lost them considerable altitude and the mountains had dropped with them: these were now only a girdle of blue on the horizon, low and displacing little of a sky still clouded and grey. No sheep could be heard or seen; Sheila remembered that they had started neither grouse nor pheasant as they walked; not even a peewit called remotely over the great saucer of moor near the centre of which the house before them appeared to lie. Loneliness. And she recalled the man – a shepherd at all points, Dick had called him – who had trudged up through this solitude to their prison. These people – it was to put it mildly – were bracingly efficient. Dick, she saw, was frowning. For him perhaps the challenge lay in that: efficiency that had taken craziness as its bride.

  His glance was moving steadily from where they lay towards the eastern horizon. Perhaps – she thought, disconcerted – his problem remained obstinately her own personal safety. If that was so she knew it would be impossible to move him. He was that sort of young man. She wished he would speak.

  He completed his survey carefully, and with an appearance of qualified satisfaction. When he did speak it was to whisper: ‘It’s wonderful to be alive.’

  She was startled. ‘I suppose it’s always that.’

  He shook his head, absently and as if in the presence of an enigma. Then he spoke rapidly. ‘It’s a big house – looks as if it might be back of a lot. And we’ve got them by surprise and we’ve got a gun. With luck we might clean up the whole place.’ He put the gun on the heather beside Sheila. ‘But first I’m going to reconnoitre. We can’t risk our whole force – and your information – against an objective of unknown strength: you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Dick.’ Sheila was helplessly under orders.

  ‘And the first thing is to make sure they’re our friends. You see that pump? It shows they store their own gas – and that means they do their coming and going by car. I’m going to search the outhouses for the car that was at the station: I’d know it, and if it’s there we’ll know. Then I’m going to try and get an idea of who’s about. Have you got a watch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Give me twenty minutes from the time I disappear. If I’m not back by that, well – it will be just too bad.’ He smiled grimly into the heather.

  ‘But, Dick–’

  ‘And now the important part. The moment my time’s up you start moving east. I can’t figure out where we are and there just isn’t a landmark to make guessing worth while. But in the north of Scotland that policeman is more likely to be in the direction of the North Sea than of the Atlantic Ocean. See?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘The mist has left us in none too good a spot. But there’s this bit of ridge we’re behind now: follow it and you’ll make that dark patch most part of a mile on.’ He pointed steadily. ‘That’s a long hollow, foreshortened: it’s dark because it is a hollow and the sun isn’t yet into it. At the end of that’ – he was looking at her dark suit – ‘put on the raincoat and walk slowly on in a zigzag. And stop a bit every dozen or twenty yards.’

  ‘Why ever–’

  ‘Because you’re being a sheep to any naked eye at the house. And binoculars you must just pray against. It won’t be for very far; in a short mile I think you’ll be able to manoeuvre the house out of sight and keep it so. Then go east till you’re ready to drop. Nothing short of a village will be quite safe; ten to one a croft or cottage would be, but this looks like headquarters and they may have their outposts here and there. Can you talk like a duchess?’

  ‘I could try.’

  ‘Don’t waste many words on policeman Dugal or Alec when you find him. Make him produce a telephone and get right through on long-distance to the bigwigs. Are your relations here important folk?’

  ‘Tolerably that.’

  ‘Then the sheriffs or chief constables or whatever they are will be the less inclined to think your most unlikely story phony. But that’s all just in case be. I feel we’re going to fix this ourselves, Sheila Grant.’

  He was gone. A wriggle of slim khaki-clad hips; the glint of a long bare leg; heather, cautiously displaced, falling again over the sole of a large shoe: for a moment there were these things – and he was gone. It was les
s than an hour since she had seen him for the first time.

  Sheila looked at her watch. It had stopped. She made a guess and set it at eight o’clock. The second hand began to jerk laboriously round the dial, as if time were a sticky element through which consciousness had to drag itself step by step. A minute passed. She decided that she must collectedly survey both the situation and the scene.

  In a sense these were one. Like a child sunk in the part of a hunter or an Indian brave, she had to think and act sheerly in terms of a surrounding physical world; the swell of a hillock, the drift of a cloud, guesses at distance, at direction, at the intentions and dispositions of enemies lurking and unseen: these, abruptly, had become her life. She parted the heather and looked again at the house. Its east façade presented itself obliquely to where she lay; early sunlight glinted on windows which appeared for the most part curtained and closed. Of life there was no sign save in the single column of bluish smoke which rose slowly and as if heavy with sleep from offices at the back. An indication perhaps that the inhabitants were not numerous… She tried to trace the route which Dick Evans must be taking to the house. There was a ditch, and a broken dry dyke which looked as if it might have bounded a previous property less considerable than this – perhaps another croft. These gave something like cover as far as the outbuildings, but the house itself looked formidable indeed. With an effort she stayed her glance from going back to the watch on her wrist and looked instead at the depression in the heather where Dick had lain. Close by his rucksack she saw the pistol. He had left it behind.

  Deliberately. For she knew that this acquaintance of a night didn’t make mistakes of that sort. He had left the gun and his leaving it was only part of something secret about him, a step in some ulterior intention of which she had been uneasily aware as he had slipped from her. She frowned and raising her head scanned the horizons. Folk would be up now; everywhere countryfolk would be up; somewhere surely a drift or smudge of smoke would give evidence of at least a hamlet – a clachan nestling in a fold of the moors.