When at length she reached it she found little to see: a few smartened-up cottages, some boring modern houses, a church decorated in the usual flint, but also a post office, and that was obviously her first port of call. With the sound of rock music in her ears, she tied Boris to a convenient rail and went inside among picture postcards and toffee bars as well as stamps and telegram forms.
Instead of a fat old woman with glasses and a pencil stuck in her hair, Lucy found a fresh-faced one little older than herself, in dark slacks and a tee-shirt bearing the name and device of a brand of American cigarette. No less unexpectedly, this person reduced the music to almost nothing without being asked, and smiled a welcome.
‘Colonel Procope?’ she said at once when the name was mentioned. ‘Straight down the hill over there, lane at the bottom on the left, a bit under a mile along on the left. Say twenty minutes’ walk. I suppose it’d be quicker on horseback. That is your horse out there, is it?’
‘Thank you. Yes.’
‘Work at a riding stable, do you?’
‘No. No, he’s my very own horse. I keep him at home and look after him there myself.’
‘That’s nice,’ said the young woman vaguely. She looked out of the window and then over her shoulder before glancing at Lucy and away again. ‘You, er, excuse me asking, but would you be a great friend of his worship the colonel?’
‘Certainly not. My parents see him occasionally but only as a neighbour.’
Lucy thought this description sounded pretty hollow, but it evidently reassured the other girl, who said with another smile, ‘I thought you weren’t, well, his type, kind of thing. Er, he’s not exactly popular round here at the moment.’
‘What’s he been up to?’
‘Not that he’s ever been very highly thought of in these parts, but just the other day, see, he went too far. One of the village lads, young Tommy, well, he’s only a boy, really, not too bright if you know what I mean, anyway, Tommy was playing round the colonel’s place, just like a kid, you know, he wouldn’t be doing any harm, and his nibs flies into a tremendous rage, shouts at him, says he’ll give him a thrashing if he doesn’t make himself scarce that minute. Then laughed and said he was only joking.’
Lucy thought for a minute. ‘Did Tommy tell you all this?’
‘His mother had to like drag it out of him.’
‘Rough luck on poor little Tommy. Did he say anything else?’
‘No. Oh, there was one bit, he said there was something funny about the shed in the colonel’s garden.’
‘M’m. What sort of something funny? I suppose he didn’t say.’
‘Not really. Something about a hole. His mother said he sounded frightened.’
The girl behind the counter herself spoke with sudden reluctance, as if she repented a little of having been so informative. Lucy took her cue, bought a couple of chocolate biscuits and departed.
Twenty minutes later the biscuits were inside Boris and he was standing in the shade and out of view while Lucy, also out of view, sat looking down on Colonel Procope’s domain. This consisted of a small stone-dressed cottage of no particular consequence, a couple of wooden outbuildings and a fragment of land with a spinney at one end and an open gateway on to the road or lane. This was a rough-and-ready affair that on one hand became no more than a track and on the other led to a bridge across a considerable stream. On the far side of the little valley, a more serious road led westward towards Ipswich, Cambridge and other important places.
Nobody was to be seen moving around or near the cottage, not even through the modest but serviceable pair of field glasses that Lucy habitually carried in her haversack and had hitherto shown her nothing more dramatic than the odd pair of nesting waterfowl. It was more than likely that there was nobody in the cottage either. The sense of adventure that had uplifted her since she had reached the village began to subside, leaving her with a half-memory of more childish would-be exploits, adventures of the mind founded on reading and day-dreaming. She was on the point of calling off her fruitless vigil, remounting Boris and making for home – it was too late now for any trip to the coast – when a large dark-blue car she had glimpsed across the valley came into her view again making for the cottage. In due time it slowed up, drove through the gateway, stopped, and set down a figure she recognized without her field glasses as the eccentric colonel. Lucy had calculated that one or other of the outbuildings must be a garage, but if so Procope made no immediate use of it; instead, he went and unlocked the door of a small shed. Seen through her glasses now, he looked carefully about him before going inside. Though Lucy had no fear of being seen as long as she kept still, she found this intensive survey disturbing in some way. It took a full half-minute to complete, at the end of which time he did enter the shed and no doubt locked the door after him. There was no sign of the younger man who had acted as chauffeur in the past, nor of anybody else.
Lucy waited without result. She was again about to leave when she saw the door of the shed open and Procope emerge. After locking up once more, he gave a somewhat abbreviated repeat of his all-round scrutiny, then moved to the front of his cottage, which was out of her view, and presumably went in at the front door. When another ten minutes had passed without incident, she left her observation post, went to reassure Boris, who stood placidly tethered to a handy tree, and walked down the grassy slope towards Procope’s abode, expecting any moment a challenging shout at best. None came. Still nothing happened when she reached the shed and peered in through a small window.
The interior was dark, and her own reflection kept hampering her attempts to see inside, but quite soon she found a vantage point that gave her a limited view. It was not so limited that she failed to make out part of a shallow trench dug in the earth floor of the shed at one end. So that was the hole young Tommy had seen: a trench. But what was a trench doing in a shed? Was it a trench?
Lucy’s heart had begun to beat fast. Trying not to think, only to act, she hurried back to Boris and rode in a sort of semicircle along the slope, down and back till she was approaching along the lane from the village. At Procope’s gate she dismounted, having done just enough thinking to run up an elementary story about finding herself in the district with time to spare and paying a call on the off chance that he would be at home.
The front door of the cottage had an old-fashioned bell pull that set up a tuneless jangling somewhere inside. Nothing happened for so long that Lucy had almost made to ring again when the door was flung open to reveal Colonel Procope.
The declining sun clearly illuminated a look of eager welcome on his face which very soon gave place to puzzlement, consternation, anger if not more. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’
She had her back to the light; she was far from his mind; her hair was hidden; he had never done more than glance at her. These points occurred to her later; for the moment she was aware only that he had not recognized her. It seemed to her suddenly important to remain unrecognized. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said, trying to look as well as sound rustic and gawky, ‘but I wondered if my horse could have a drink of water.’
‘Certainly not! Get out!’ He was shouting and glaring, his fierce eyes doubly strange under the brown thatch of hair. ‘If you don’t, if you’re not gone by the time I finish talking’ – his voice rose to something like a scream and a fleck of saliva hit her cheek – ‘I promise you I’ll set my dogs on you and I won’t be calling them off!’
There was no need on Lucy’s part for any mimicry of someone badly disconcerted and frightened. She was back in the saddle, and had cantered a hundred yards towards the village, before she had time to reflect that any available dogs of the sort implied would assuredly have made a tremendous noise at the first sound of an unexpected visitor. Later still it occurred to her that no horse needed to be taken in search of water with a whole river a bare hundred yards away, but that was not going to matter now.
She arrived back at the post office in time to g
et some change and was soon on the telephone to Edward’s college, to the porter there who advised her to ring the old mill house, then to Edward himself who listened to her account of events without asking any questions, except where he would find her on his arrival in something under the hour. Lucy went to the saloon bar of the designated pub on the far side of the village green, which was nice enough but not as nice as Mr Littlejohn’s, and very slowly drank a half-pint of shandy (heavy on the lemonade).
Bit by bit her excitement ebbed away and with it all pretence of certainty, all her former sense of having happened to catch Colonel Procope on the point of committing some fearful atrocity. He had responded with surely disproportionate anger to a stranger’s innocent intrusion, for such it had been to his knowledge, and had perhaps shown something of the same earlier to young Tommy. There were a dozen possible explanations for that. He was secretive about his shed, inside which he had dug a trench, and that trench might to a fevered fancy like her own – she admitted it now to herself – have been a grave. And it might have been an unknown number of other things besides. He, the colonel, had fabricated eight lines in the general style of a two-hundred-year-old poem to send a message to a friend who quite likely had been a spy. What had Edward called the basis for that notion? Surmise, perhaps leaving a ruder word unspoken. What he would call her more recent notions Lucy dreaded to think.
Her heart sank further when at last he arrived. She knew immediately from the way he looked round the bar, spotted her, came over, greeted her with a touch of solicitude, that he had not taken her tale seriously. He had turned up for merely avuncular reasons, to give her moral support and to calm her down. His manner was studiedly non-committal when she acted on his request to go over things again.
‘So according to you,’ said Edward after listening to her, ‘you surprised the colonel just as his friend Green, having received and acted on his message, was about to walk in, be killed and be buried in the garden shed. Well now, why would the colonel want to kill his old mate after so elaborately persuading him to come all this way?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Lucy, adding stoutly, ‘but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a reason.’
‘True, as far as it goes. How, do you think, would the colonel have known so exactly when Green was due after his long and difficult journey? And how might he have induced Green to call on him?’
‘He’s on the telephone.’
‘True again. If Green was indeed going to appear, he might do so at almost any hour of any day out of, let’s say a hundred.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you happened to come along and poke your nose in at the precise time he was expected.’
Lucy said forcefully, ‘That’s right, perhaps I did, and it’s no argument against the manifestation of an unlikely coincidence to notice that such a manifestation, though perfectly possible, is unlikely.’
‘True a third time. I think. Now I’m going to have a large glass of whisky. What about you? Would you like something of the sort yourself?’
‘No, thank you.’ She was slightly astonished. ‘What, what for?’
‘To strengthen you against a coming ordeal, or what may very well turn out to be one. We’re off back to the colonel’s place to see what we can catch him at.’
‘Oh, are we? Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait till dark?’
‘He’ll be on his guard then, and I want to see the ground in the light. The sooner we’re there the better.’
When Edward had returned from the counter with his whisky, she said, ‘Have you told, you know, your friends in the company about any of this?’
He hesitated briefly. ‘No.’
‘Because you don’t want to look ridiculous. As ridiculous as you think my story is.’
Dropping all lightness from his manner, and focusing his attention on her in a way he had never done before, he took her hands in a loose but strong grip. ‘I think it only just conceivable that your story has any substance in it at all. And that’s how you feel yourself, isn’t it? But I’d be a fool if I didn’t follow it up. And I’d be worse than a fool if I didn’t do something to repay the trust you showed in me when you asked me to help you.’
She was not sure she understood all the meaning behind his words, but she caught his tone immediately and responded to it. ‘I’m ready whenever you say.’
He gave a wide grin with his eyes fixed on hers, another new expression, and squeezed her hands for a moment. ‘Good. Now where’s that horse of yours?’
‘I suppose you mean Boris. He’s on the green outside here, or he was when I last looked.’
‘Yes, I thought I saw him,’ he said without much conviction, half got up, remembered his whisky and drained it. ‘Right. Order of march. You lead on Boris. I follow in my trusty shooting-brake, which I should like to pull up and put somewhere out of the way a couple of hundred yards short of the objective. Is that possible?’
‘We’ll pass a bridge over the river on our right. After that I’ll dismount at a point where you should be able to drive off the road.’
He nodded and they left without further ado. Outside they parted in silence, Edward to his car, Lucy to Boris, who showed no resentment at having had to put up with a pretty dull hour, though he was obviously dying to be off somewhere. Before she put her foot in the stirrup she said to him,
‘Now this is probably going to be nothing at all, but on the other hand you may find yourself having to do something pretty serious and grown-up, and I’ll be relying on you. Are you ready for that?’
He tossed his head in a twisty, sporty way that showed he was ready for anything.
‘Okay. Walk march.’
Behind her, she heard Edward start his engine but did not look back. Down the slight hill they went, left into the lane, up to the bridge. The light was still strong, but anyone would have known that evening was not far off. Colonel Procope’s cottage came into sight. Soon afterwards, Lucy dismounted as arranged and led Boris to a point in somebody’s field where he would not be disturbed and could not be seen from the road. Here she tied him to a fencing post by a rope long enough to let him graze without getting tangled, gave him some bread she had been saving and stroked his forehead and down to his nose. She told him to stay quiet and not to worry, because she would be back for him. Her heart was beating fast again, this time from fear, not of the colonel or whatever he might do but of his doing nothing, nothing out of the ordinary, of his turning out to be up to nothing worth all this fuss.
Edward’s demeanour, when she joined him in the lane, quite failed to reassure her. His air of serious concentration, his vigilant peering ahead and around, showed her again that he was doing no more than humouring her and was perhaps already rehearsing his indulgent rebuke of her overheated imagination, fondness for sensational fiction and more. So what actually happened when they got to the cottage came as a surprise as well as a shock to them both.
Before Lucy had had time to do more than wonder what Edward had in mind, someone indoors gave a loud scream. It was a different sort of sound from anything she had heard as part of any film or imagined from reading any book; it might have come from a man or a woman or even an animal, and it set up a violent tingling at the back of Lucy’s neck, hot or cold, she could not tell which. There were other noises too that might have been bodies striking against furniture. Somewhere at the back a door opened. Edward caught her arm and led her a few yards in that direction before dropping into a crouch behind an evergreen bush and pulling her down beside him. They heard a shout or two, not nearly as loud as the scream, and then a man unknown to them came out through the doorway in an irregular walk, very much like somebody trying to make his way along the deck of a ship in rough weather. He had not gone far when he collapsed on the ground near a water butt, though his arms and legs still moved.
So far, things had seemed to happen slowly, but now they greatly speeded up. Another man, one with blood on his forehead, one recognizable as Colonel Procope, came running
out of the cottage and flung himself on top of the man on the ground. It was hard to follow details, but soon a voice said or called something and the first man no longer moved. The colonel got to his feet and stood for a moment, swaying slightly and panting and looking down at the other, who was dead; Lucy had never seen death before, but she found she knew it when she saw it. Then the colonel took the corpse’s wrists in a businesslike way and started to drag it face upwards towards the shed.
‘That’s Green,’ Edward muttered to Lucy and at once sprang up and ran towards the two figures. She followed. Procope turned and saw Edward and gave him a blow that sent him down into an all-fours position. Lucy went for the colonel, who hit her on the side of the jaw with his fist. She too went down, afraid she might be sick, able to see but not very well, as if through a flyscreen. By the time she was fully herself again, Colonel Procope had shut the door of his expensive car and was driving off, scattering gravel from under his tyres as he turned into the lane. Edward followed, but some distance behind, and when Lucy reached him he had already given up the chase.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘He can’t get far, but he might—’
‘You never know. Come on,’ she said, running past him.
He came up with her. ‘I’ll never catch him in my car.’
‘I’ve got another idea’ – one she thought was hopeless but was going to try.
‘It’s no good.’
‘Just run.’
Lucy soon forged ahead. She had won both the 100 yards and the 220 in her last year at school, but she had run no faster then than now, despite her riding clothes. Her speed may even have increased when she saw ahead of her that, in his haste, Colonel Procope had overshot the bridge and was now backing and trying to turn his car. At one point he must have stalled, for she heard the high rattle of the starter. Then she had run far enough, and at her best speed hurried to Boris, unhitched him and got him back to the lane in time to meet a flushed and gasping Edward.
Dear Illusion: Collected Stories Page 43