The Secret Vanguard

by Michael Innes

  There was nothing. She tried to form a rational estimate of the degree of loneliness, the possible acres or square miles of solitude, which the highlands of Scotland could contain. But she had been only so intermittently Scottish. And one forgot. That snow peak which they had glimpsed from the croft: it might have told much to a person properly informed. But one forgot all but the idea – the mere song of the place. Like Dick Evans’ speech: after a few years of Oxford and the pursuit of Caravaggio he had really forgotten, and the rhythms of his speech were English – with the ghost of American song blowing, perhaps conscientiously, though in the accent that had made her dream of the Statue of Liberty, the idiom that had pronounced her a grand girl. But this was irrelevant; the point was that she had forgotten more of Scotland than was safe. Still the blood is strong, the heart is highland…maybe, but it wasn’t enough. One wanted a topographical intelligence and a social sense which were unimpairedly highland, too.

  She looked at her watch. Then she looked again at the house, fixedly. Nothing stirred and across the hundred yards that separated her from it no sound drifted. She looked at her watch again and then at the dry dyke, at the ditch, at the nearer heather. She shivered. Surely it was cold. She looked at her watch. The twenty minutes was up.

  10: Hawk

  Sheila took the gun in her hand for examination. It was small – the sort of thing, she remembered, that lavishly curved and sparingly attired ladies opportunely produce from evening bags on the covers of sensational magazines. Sheila noted at what strange moments irrelevant things will drift into view; noted that the noting, too, was strange; realized that while her mind occupied itself with this rubbish her body, mysteriously impelled, was worming itself cautiously towards the house – the house from which Dick Evans had not returned.

  She forced herself to a halt and again studied the gun. Experimentally, she poised it before her. Something gave at the root of her thumb. She examined this: it was a sort of press stud – like the button one used to push down before moving the gear lever into reverse. In fact a safety catch. Grasp the butt firmly then and the weapon was presumably ready to fire. She could go on.

  The house was nearer. On the east wall the sun was brighter; patches of sunlight now were moving about the moor. She was herself in sunlight. She paused warily. On the heather before her a shadow moved.

  It was a false alarm: a hawk. Low on her right the bird hovered, swooped, checked itself, soared, hung. Breathtaking. And then she remembered.

  Where the westerly spur of the furthermost mountain

  Hovers falcon-like…

  She knew about that. And nobody else knew – nobody except Dick, and Dick was gone. And, almost, he had made her promise. Or by not speaking of a promise he had established it that they agreed. Should this reconnaissance fail it was her first duty to get away, to get herself and these cryptic verses to safety together. Whatever else had remained hidden in his mind this had been clear between them. Their motives had differed. But the pact was there and to be honoured. She looked again at the hawk; it hung splendid in the morning. Sheila put the pistol in her jacket pocket and turned her face towards the sun.

  They had descended on the crest of a ridge which here, a stone’s throw from the house, swept boldly to the east, but which diminished as it did so to a low and discontinuous swell running across the shallow concave of the moor. The cover afforded was like that a field mouse might find behind a half-buried root; but with occasional gaps it stretched to the considerable depression which Dick had pointed to as lying still in shadow. Sheila wriggled her arms through the straps of the rucksack and set out on hands and knees.

  On the higher ridge the surface had been sparse turf, bare earth, boulders, and heather in scattered clumps. But here the heather was luxuriant; it trammelled foot and knee and hand so that progress was laborious in an extreme. Sheila made fifty yards and rested. Deer-stalkers presumably behaved like this – or perhaps they did so only in ancient numbers of Punch: cockney deerstalkers, and dour gillies recognizing them as not at all the real thing… Sheila made a grab at her wandering mind and found that her head was swimming slightly. She had absorbed nothing but chloroform and milk and chocolate over an unknown length of time: perhaps that was it. Or perhaps it was Dick Evans and what had become of him. Suddenly, and as if the thing had been spoken into her ear where she lay, the immediateness of her own danger came to her. If Dick had been caught then they were hunting for her now. She got to her feet and, stooping low, went forward at a stumbling run.

  But later she was to move like a sheep. And that didn’t fit – didn’t fit into the time scheme of the thing as it must certainly be. For if they were out and after her… Sheila knew that there was something she ought to know – something she was being stupid not to grasp. She stumbled on, bent low. There was a Massine ballet in which people moved like this – only round and round in a circle. She must not move round and round in a circle… Again she caught at her mind. This was certainly some delayed reaction to having been drugged. To steady herself she straightened up and looked back at the house. What she took for the crack of a pistol shot followed.

  It was a door. It was, carried over the morning stillness of the moor, nothing but the sound of the slamming of a door in the house. An outer door: she ducked and peered over the low ridge as if across a parapet. Everything again was silent and the house lay lifeless still. Reassured, she stooped again and ran on. And then an impulse made her once more stop and look. A man, tall and clad in grey tweed, was striding past the outbuildings in the direction in which she and Dick had recently lain. He moved with measured haste, and at a guess he was going up the ridge towards the croft. When he gained the ridge he would have outflanked her shelter; a glance to his left and he would command the whole length of this low spur which concealed her from the house.

  She lay down, thrust her legs through heather, drew heather across her face, wrenched at the roots of a clump until it came away and she could spray it across her back. And that was all that could be done. There was Dick’s mac – what he called his raincoat – but that was in the rucksack and there was no time to get it out. Sheila lay and cursed the chance that had dressed her in dark blue West of England cloth instead of heather mixture or the grey of the man who was now on the ridge.

  Then she saw what she must do. At just the right moment she must slip to the other side and risk espial from the house. She waited, rose, ran. It had been like dodging a bull round a haystack. The house was now directly before her. The man was invisible. But what would he command as he climbed higher? Sheila, doubtful of the answer, felt what was surely a first stir of panic – panic lest she lose her wits. Should she lurk, or move slowly forward at that painful stoop, or go all out for distance – for that splash of shadow on the moor which Dick had seen as safety? And again panic stirred, stirred because she had been so dull as not to see that the answer stared at her. The answer stared because the house stared – stared from a score of commanding windows. From these there was no hiding; there was only flight. She lifted her short skirt high above the knee and ran.

  She ran or bounded – an uneven plunging gait that took her best over the heather. And as she ran the moor, which had lain so silent about her when she crouched to listen, seemed to break into a murmur of distinguishable but confluent sounds. Somewhere behind her a man’s voice called out a name; but it was the same name that lapwings, too, were crying far ahead. She sprang a covey of partridge almost at her feet; the whirr of their wings, like the rip of rubber tyres silently propelled over bitumen, was submerged beneath the rising, throbbing, falling call of a curlew as it passed, a sirening ambulance or fire engine of the sky, remote overhead. She ran on blindly, as one who plunges recklessly for the safety of a distant pavement. And on a dozen notes sheep, invisible but threatening, baa’d like impatient motorists honking as some flustered woman bars their way. She was moving more easily, faster; too fast, for her head was outs
tripping her heels; ridiculously fast, for the sheep had stopped baaing and were chuckling at her. The chuckle grew. It ran beside her. It dived for her ankles and she came tumbling down, half on heather and half in the chill and babbling water of a burn.

  The burn murmured. There was no other sound. The bleat of the sheep had cut itself off with unnatural abruptness, like a sound effect on a film: she had run steeply down into a hollow wholly sheltered from the broad life of the moor. She lay in chill shadow; here there were wraiths of mist still – stragglers hopelessly cut off from the broken armies of the dawn. She stood up and her head was in sunlight. The secret glen with its cold and amber stream ran before her eastward away.

  Sheila drank and walked rapidly on. She would have to do far better than this. Her body was in excellent trim and even with a swimming head she could walk all day. It was her mind that was out of training – that had never been in training for this sort of thing. Unless perhaps in the womb, in recapitulating endless generations of wary animal life. And something of the sort was moving in her, something primitive indeed. Suddenly she was untroubled for the time by the fate of the young man behind her, untroubled even though it was to him that her liberty was due. She was untroubled by whatever issues – grave they might be or petty merely – hung upon the strange intrigue on which she had stumbled. She was escaping; she was manoeuvring; she was going to turn the tables yet. It was the game of games. On just this all games ever invented were exactly based. Sheila saw this heather tamed and these boulders stacked away; she saw people stumping about playing golf, as at Gleneagles. Smack…stump, stump, stump…smack. She laughed aloud and at once she knew that any wits she had were going to be available to her now. She walked on.

  Dick Evans had played her a trick. A trick to get her away and give her time. He had hidden, knowing that in twenty minutes she would be off. He would wait – perhaps until someone from the house was well on his way to seek his fellow at the croft – and then, she guessed, he would have his whack. Without the pistol, too, with just the sling he had got out of Correggio or Caravaggio or whoever it was. Well, let him. Dick Evans was plumb crazy and a man to love. Let him have his whack and good luck. She would go on.

  She would go on. It was high adventure; at the same time she saw with a new and comforting clarity that it was the sober course. The calculating animal part, which is realistic and knows nothing of romance, told her that it was the thing to do. Her best chance and Dick’s lay in contacting the rule of law somewhere to the east. And she was the best part of a mile farther on. The burn had doubled back on itself and now the little glen was rising once more before her to the level of the moor. For a moment she thought of retracing her steps and following the water, which clearly must somewhere continue to follow a sunken and therefore sheltered course. But Dick had insisted that direction was the first essential. So – first stopping to put on the raincoat – she climbed straight on. A mile through the glen and perhaps half a mile all told before that: the house ought to be at least a mile and a half away when it became visible again. And the man climbing the ridge would be a good deal farther off than that. If on the skyline he would be visible enough, but she herself ought to be pretty well beyond any notice by a naked eye. Or so she thought. Distances, she realized, were things that had hitherto existed without precision in her mind.

  She was up, and there was the house behind her with its single column of blue-grey smoke. She lay down to study it. The windows could be distinguished, but a crenellated structure which she remembered on the tower – battlements perhaps two or three feet high – was merely a blur. No one was visible on the ridge. And looking the other way one would have the sun in one’s eyes: it was still low upon the moor. All this was good – so good that Sheila wondered if she ought to waste time in behaving like a sheep. She strained her eyes for real sheep on the moor. Here and there she could observe them: clearly enough at what she calculated as anything under a mile. And hard by the house she saw movement – something that was mere movement rather than any distinguishable form. It was a straying and intermittent movement – almost certainly sheep. She supposed that the nature of such a movement could indeed betray the form of what was moving. A drifting and halting human might be seen as a sheep, whereas a human moving in a purposive straight line could be a human merely. There was about half a mile to go: there the moor dipped again and the house would sink out of sight. Sheila decided to obey orders still.

  Slowly she walked forward some twenty paces, stopped, and at an obtuse angle moved forward again. Perhaps she looked like a sheep; she felt more like a little yacht tacking laboriously over the surface of the moor. And it was nerve-racking to a degree; she realized that she had not before required to take such a grip of herself as now. The technique was designed to delude observation, not to escape it. Hostile eyes were posited as there at the house; it was difficult not to add binoculars to them in the imagination, and in the imagination to add below that a sudden triumphant smile. Licensed so far, imagination would take control. The breath of wind that blew now on the moor would become the indistinguishable murmur of pursuit; it would brush the heather in stealthy footsteps which would be always behind her whichever way she turned…

  Sheila thrust the binoculars from her mind. She looked up. The hawk was still above. Or perhaps it was a different hawk – but hovering again in the eye of the morning, poised on some centre within itself, master of all that field of air. She looked at it fixedly. Then she moved forward once more – ramblingly, like a sheep.

  11: Hare

  Sheep have two ways of moving: Sheila looked at a narrow track which had discovered itself at her feet and realized this. On ground approximating to open pasture they move ramblingly – as Dick had thought of them doing, as she herself had dimly descried them doing near the house. But in steep or barren places, or where heath grows so thickly that there is little to crop, they will make and keep to paths as direct as arterial roads, and along these they will move steadily either alone or in groups. The valley sheep are fatter, thought Sheila, but the mountain sheep cover more ground. It was annoying that she had been imitating the wrong sort of sheep, but satisfactory that her wits had now tumbled to the mistake. Not that there was far to go… She walked straight on and in five minutes was over the brow of the moor.

  The house had vanished; with luck she would not see it again unless in the company of a substantial number of Inverness-shire police. And now she looked for sign of some other and less sinister habitation. But moorland stretched once more void before her. There was no croft, no clachan, not as much as a dyke. And there were no butts. In much of the north of Scotland, she knew, the common business of life was discouraged; the country was a place for people to come and shoot over; in a few weeks they would be congregating at Euston and King’s Cross; miles of smoothly-rolling sleeping cars would whirl them discreetly through the slums of Wigan and Preston, of Durham and Newcastle – and next day they would be in the highlands, feudally attired in tartans doubtfully associated with aunts by marriage and second cousins twice removed. That sort of thing. But reflection on its dubious comedy was not the point. It was the point that these folk appeared not to come here. Here there appeared to be little game and no provision to cope with it. Only far to the north she could see a pine forest or plantation with a deep ride cut through. There was no other sign of the hand of man.

  And yet the prospect before her was extensive; the moors rolled eastward to hills or mountains which were now only uncertainly revealed amid gathering cloud. This extent of solitude was surely impossible; it was a trick of the terrain; here and there before her surely a fold of the ground must conceal at least a shepherd’s hut. She looked for smoke. There was none.

  But there was mist again. The sun had failed to keep its command of the day; clouds were darkening in the east and out of nothing wisps of vapour gathered and drifted. The browns and greens of the moor, the blue into which each melted at a distance, darken
ed as she walked; bell heather, already in flower, dusked its pink to purple as the light grew lurid overhead. A storm, perhaps a thunderstorm, was coming up.

  Sheila walked on for an hour, walked into a light breeze that died presently and left the moor very still. Then she heard the storm: a vibration merely, a murmur of wind through conifers, thunder infinitely remote. But behind her, which could hardly be… And the illusion lasted only a moment. She realized that the vibration had the precise pulse of a man-made thing. She was listening to the purr of an engine far away.

  It grew and she took cover; it grew louder and she saw. The track from the house must run eastward; rough and indistinguishable, it must lie there a mile to the north. For a mile to the north, and travelling at a speed which must be breakneck on such a surface, was a car. Dust obscured it, but it appeared to be big and grey; it was level with her; it was far ahead and had vanished; she got up and walked on.

  For her, this might mean much or little. It might mean Dick discovered and the hue and cry; it might be merely these people going unsuspecting about their sinister occasions. But her ear was strained as she walked, and within ten minutes she heard on her other hand the sound of a second engine, an engine this of a less rapid pulse. And now she had to take cover in earnest; the thing was almost directly behind her and passed presently at little more than a furlong’s range. Two men. But it was at the vehicle that she stared open-eyed; it ran briskly over the moor on three pairs of enormous wheels and for a moment she could think of it as nothing but the frankest vehicle of war – something from a page of manoeuvres in an illustrated paper. Then she remembered once more the people who scramble into kilts. They used such things nowadays instead of ponies to carry the luncheon hampers and the fatter tweeded women: that was it. And this was what was called being up against it indeed.