Red Anger

by Geoffrey Household

  He walked confidently straight down the hill as if he had just come over the top. The man in the station wagon must of course have spotted him but nothing could be done about it. Then he swung south for the Stone Avenue which he reached in ten minutes. For most of the time he was in full view of anyone in Avebury, or at least of anyone standing on the high bank of the Circle. At that distance I could not make out his figure with any certainty, but I did notice that when the motor coach came down and the tourists piled in one was walking away.

  By this time the CIA men had returned, having drawn a blank. They all drove back into Avebury and were lost among the trees; so it was safe to crawl up my terrace to the top of the downs. Not a soul was to be seen, but I had learned that one could not trust to eyes. However, if the KGB observer was still among the Grey Wethers he could not catch me without running. And that did not seem to be at all the style of either of these bands of missionaries creeping like cockroaches in daytime about my country, always determined not to be conspicuous.

  I walked fast and openly down the Ridge Way and crossed the Marlborough road after taking a good look round. No car was there to intercept me, innocently loitering along the edge of the modern road; nor on the ancient one was anyone taking a fast and casual stroll over the short turf. But I could bet that my movements were being reported. I put an immediate end to observation by fording the Kennet where I used to paddle as a small boy and by vanishing into fertility, hidden by the willows on the bank, the hedges bounding the water meadows and the canopy of foliage around the church and in the manor gardens.

  There was no Alwyn at the bridge. After I had remained there a few minutes to give him a chance to see me, I decided to reconnoitre the corner where the lane to the village left the main road. Avoiding the lane itself, I went round by way of the Sanctuary, the small Circle close to the water which must have supplied those prehistoric settlers and their hanging fields. My father used to say that the Sanctuary was dedicated to the God of the River and that the Stone Avenue was a triumphal way along which were dragged the cartloads of great pots up to the gardens and the terraces. Mere imagination, I suppose, but one farmer is in tune with another.

  The concrete plinths of the Sanctuary—I regret to say that the foundations of our house were some of the original stones—plus a few drifting foreign tourists covered my approach until I could see the road junction. At the entrance to the lane a large car was parked, coloured a cheerful blue-and-yellow which was more vulgar than sinister. Three men and a woman were in it. I recognised the woman. I had rowed her up to Eel Pie Island on a lovely morning. The reason for her presence was obvious. She was the only available KGB operator who knew me by sight—apart from my naval friend who could not take part in so dubious an outing. They had brought her down, I take it, as a kindly thought for my welfare in case Marghiloman’s intentions were ungentlemanly. Thoughts would not be so kindly now that they knew I had been in Alwyn’s company.

  I did not like this continuous, close contact, though I was for the moment in a populated district and could hardly be kidnapped. Indeed I had only to sing out that I was Adrian Gurney and some friend of the family would come running and swear that I hadn’t changed at all. Alwyn’s problem was more difficult. He must get clear away, but had to avoid being trapped in some unobservable spot and finishing up—according to him—neatly jointed and polythene-packed.

  It was easy enough to guess what had happened. Alwyn’s move had been spotted and the car driven down from Avebury—a mere three minutes’ run—to cut him off. There was no reason why he should recognise it for what it was. The woman and the three men were talking gaily; a bottle and sandwiches were circulating. If he had not suspected the car, he was still waiting for me nearby; if he had, he might have made for the downs which were just as bare and windswept on this side of the valley as the other and even more thickly inhabited by the dead. But I was fairly sure he would not have broken away. He was by now thoroughly suspicious of this country so different from his Devon of small fields and lush growth and would hesitate to expose himself again on the slopes. And, for another thing, he was quite unnecessarily loyal to me.

  I went through the village once more, and he joined me on the main street coming quietly from the yews of the churchyard. He said he had been in the willows below the bridge and had seen me all right but wanted to be sure I was not followed. Yes, he had noticed the car and avoided it, but the occupants had had plenty of time to watch his approach to the Marlborough road and could now have no doubt at all that he was Alwyn Rory.

  ‘And after you had gone off towards the Sanctuary I went into the church.’

  ‘What for?’ I asked, meaning that I had wasted time looking for him.

  ‘Put it that my own love of country begins with two bits of wood, not a circle of stone.’

  For the moment the KGB were checkmated by the leafiness of an English village. They could, of course, use their speed and charge up and down the only two lanes out of the place. That, however, would give their identity away if we saw them—as was likely—and they failed to see us. Their best bet was to sit still and wait for developments, meanwhile getting their man with the walkie-talkie down from the Grey Wethers and on to high ground on our side of the valley.

  We too wondered whether we might not sit still till nightfall, possibly in the village inn. That would have fixed the KGB, but we could not count on the patience of the CIA or guess what they were up to. They wanted Petrescu badly and might well use the police to detain him or play their old trick of impersonating Special Branch themselves. It stood to reason that they must have seen Marghiloman’s car being driven away and only realised too late that he was not the driver. Then nobody at the rendezvous. No signs of violence. The only observers stones and tumuli, impassive and disquieting. Afterwards two men had been spotted walking away. One must be Petrescu; the other was unknown. Even at a distance they could tell that neither was Marghiloman.

  ‘Wherever we go we should avoid the tops and be in sight of other people till darkness,’ Alwyn said.

  ‘Do you feel it’s safe to start off by road?’

  ‘Provided there is occasional traffic and a cottage or two.’

  What I had in mind was the Wansdyke. It could be reached by a mile of road, very open and overlooked by hills on both sides, and then by another half mile where we could leave the road and take to the woodland alongside.

  The Wansdyke, I told him, ran from Savernake Forest to the outskirts of Bristol—with longish gaps—and all the way it was a track, a footpath or merely a ditch. He could hide in it; he could avoid towns and villages by following it; and he had perfect cover as an amateur archaeologist studying the reason why so immense an earthwork was ever built.

  ‘Then you’d better let me know why it was.’

  ‘Nobody knows. It means Woden’s Ditch—fifth century and nothing to do with all the old friends around us. A frontier, it’s said, between Saxons and Saxons or Arthur’s kingdom. Armies of men must have worked at it, for it’s still twenty feet deep in places. Yet they couldn’t possibly defend its whole length.’

  ‘Wansdyke!’ he murmured. ‘There’s a whole world of lost hopes in the name. What a place for your presences, Willie!’

  ‘I never noticed any. Beer and the sword don’t leave presences.’

  It was then that we saw the station wagon which had gone up the Herepath to look for Marghiloman. Its general appearance was less commonplace than the KGB car. The driver and his three passengers looked a bit too dead-pan and purposeful, lacking the gentle influence of the opposite sex. At a guess one would have taken them for a couple of bookies and their clerks or a gang of dealers—in old cars or antiques rather than livestock.

  The station wagon drove slowly through the village and then turned left on a course which would take them back to the main road. They might be having a last look round before heading back to London or be scouring the country with no definite aim. They cannot have been very hopeful, for our likely mo
ve, once contact was broken, was to vanish into the green-scarred downs and wait for the KGB to collect us. They could not guess that to be picked up by the KGB in any lonely spot was the last thing we wanted.

  We started out for the Wansdyke fairly confidently. There was no cover on either side of the road and no traffic; on the other hand it was not a place which an assassin would choose when a farmer’s car or a delivery van might come along at any moment. On the high ground to the left a small herd of Ayrshires were grazing. A townsman could well think that somebody unseen might be keeping an eye on them and have a full view of the road.

  We were not far from the T junction where we should turn right for the Wansdyke and at last have woodland on one side of us, when a car came round the corner towards us. There could be no doubt that it was the station wagon doing a last sweep back through the lanes instead of giving up. No escape was possible. If we tried to bolt across country we risked being followed and caught. The CIA men had looked dangerously athletic.

  ‘Quick! Do they know you by sight?’ Alwyn asked.

  ‘No, they can’t.’

  Rapid fire thinking, justifiable but disastrous. Marghiloman had implied that he was to be the Judas who would point me out. To the CIA men in Devon I had been just a name, and their operator who was watching Tessa’s movements had not recognised me. But I had long forgotten those weeks in London when strangers often stopped me to ask for directions or the right time and I had been smugly satisfied that it was my kind face which attracted them.

  I think Alwyn accepted my snap judgment because it was our only chance, not because he was convinced. He reminded me that he himself was safe; the chiefs of the CIA in London knew him by sight, but the rank and file did not. They had probably learned from MI5 or Special Branch that he was not in Moscow, but that was all.

  The station wagon came up and stopped. Its driver leaned out and asked if he was going right for East Kennett—a transparent excuse since he must have seen the signpost two hundred yards back.

  Remembering that the CIA file on Petrescu would state that he spoke only broken English, I burst into my thickest Wiltshire which I doubt if anyone under the age of sixty still speaks. They couldn’t understand me, for I kept rambling on about whether they wanted the pub or a farm. Alwyn cut me short, giving the impression that I was the village idiot, and told them to keep straight on.

  They did, but then stopped and stayed put for half a minute. My conjecture is that one of them insisted I was Petrescu and another asked him if he thought those peasant noises were Romanian. Meanwhile, we were stepping out as fast as we dared without making it too obvious. The pro-Petrescu man must have won the argument, for the car made a sudden and decisive U-turn through the long grass at the side of the road, hit an unexpected ditch and had to back out. By that time we were round the corner and in Boreham Wood.

  But far from safe. We had dropped flat only yards from the road and could not move. Two of them entered the wood; a third ran up hill towards the north-east boundary; and the fourth patrolled the road. Calling up boyhood memories I realised that they had done the right thing. It was a small hanger on the hillside in which we were trapped. All round were open fields which we should have to cross before we could reach the Wansdyke or the West Wood—two square miles of timber where we would be safe.

  No one but Alwyn could have picked the right cover for us or even spotted its possibilities at all. The trees were beech with a little fir, well spaced so that there were patches of thick undergrowth. He had stopped for an instant on entering the wood and—to my mind—wasted precious seconds looking round. What he chose was a patch of rose bay willow herb, just high enough to conceal us, in an open glade. Our pursuers ignored it and plunged straight for the self-evident—the bramble and hazel where we must be since we had had no time to go far.

  When the two had moved away, now searching the length of the ragged boundary hedge, I asked Alwyn in a whisper what weapon they were carrying.

  ‘That, Willie, is a machine pistol with a silencer. Only to persuade you to surrender without a fuss. Every intelligence organisation prefers interrogation.’

  Up to that point I had never, I think, taken his extreme caution seriously. Now at last I did. He spotted my misgivings though they were only expressed by silence.

  ‘Just as much to comfort himself as to pot at you,’ he added. ‘Always remember that in action!’

  He asked me for a situation report on the ground which I gave him, though it would have been more use to a small boy bird-nesting than two men clinging to cover which would just about do for a rabbit.

  ‘I see. Eudora and the pack at the top of the hanger, John at the north-east corner and the Whips on the road. We can’t break out without someone yelling Gone Away. But we’ll last out the season yet, Willie.’

  All this hunting stuff was to comfort the raw recruit in his first experience of lethal weapons—artificial but it worked.

  The two had now stopped searching the hedge and were climbing up through the wood. At any moment they might decide that they had gone far enough and cut straight back to the car. If they did and looked down on our patch of willow herb they were bound to see us. We were only hidden from eyes on a level with us or below us.

  We could not tell what the third man on the east side of the wood was doing—Eudora and the pack, as Alwyn called him—but even if we could reach that side we certainly could not leave it. I remembered a wide strip of bare down with a cart track running down the middle, passable for a car. To return to the road where the sentry was alert and continually on the move was equally impossible.

  So our only hope was to try for the Wansdyke itself, although that involved crossing some two hundred yards of field which might be stubble or might be grass but was open to the road. If the man patrolling it was near the T junction when we started we might just make the Wansdyke; if he was coming towards us we hadn’t a chance. And we could not watch him without exposing ourselves.

  We crouched down and used the wretched cover of the thin boundary hedge until it turned away from the road and we could stand up. The two searchers in the wood had done what we expected and cut back to the station wagon, beating out the undergrowth all the way. Giving them time enough to get well into the trees, we took to the open and started to race across what turned out to be stubble. The bank of the Wansdyke was a light green wall in front of us, looking like the edge of another wood though it was a bare forty yards wide with more open country beyond. We were nearly there when the man on the road came round the corner and saw us. He shouted to us to stop and began to run. He could not fire even if he wanted to. A tractor and trailer was in sight and he had to consider the susceptibilities of the natives.

  Crossing the Wansdyke by road you would notice our side of it only as a small copse with a deep dell in it; on the other side it was shallow and treeless, filled up by centuries of rain washing down the banks but still a work too large and smooth to be formed by water or by grubbing up some immense hawthorn hedge. That was the stretch of the ditch we intended to follow after dark, sweeping westwards over the downs past tombs and earthworks already three thousand years old when it was dug, until we came down at dawn into softer, well-timbered country where we would separate—he towards Bristol, I grabbing the first bus or train which went anywhere at all.

  As soon as we hit the leafy bottom of the Wansdyke we hurried up it and then climbed the bank to see what was going on to the north of us. The two men who had been searching our wood had come out at the top of it and joined their companion. We had been right in assuming that we could never escape into the West Woods there. The fourth man who had kept watch on the road had now taken the station wagon up the cart track and was bumping over the open ground towards the others. Their tactics were plain. They probably did not know what the belt of trees was in which we had taken shelter, but they could see that it led up to the West Woods. They were dashing to cut us off and at the same time get a clearer view of the country.

 
; They had in fact cut us off, but they could stay up there waiting for us as long as they liked. Twilight was now not far away and the bottom of the ditch was in shadow. We remained on the bank, safe in that mysterious line of defence, gazing at the long run of the Wansdyke on the other side of the road as it climbed towards the high ground and the continuation of the Ridge Way. Alwyn said that it looked like a modern tank trap.

  ‘If the bank was then sheer it would have stopped cavalry, always assuming that intelligence reports from enemy territory were accurate enough to get the swordsmen up in time to the right spot.’

  He looked at the blank skyline to the west as if tanks or perhaps Arthur’s cataphracts might be massing unseen behind it with a clear run down to the ditch.

  ‘That’s our problem, too, Willie—local intelligence in the shape of a walkie-talkie. The KGB must now recognise the CIA station wagon which went up to look for Marghiloman. The CIA have no reason to recognise theirs.’

  ‘Avebury car park?’

  ‘No, they would have been much too careful and looked like any other visitors.’

  ‘Since they are in the same line of business, the CIA must know there is a KGB car about somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, they do know now. But when they came to Avebury it was just to grab Petrescu and they were not prepared for competition. The Russians were. That man who was among the Grey Wethers—where would you post him so that he could overlook the country on this side of the Kennet?’

  ‘The Long Barrow which you saw from the road or up on the Ridge Way bang opposite to us.’

  ‘If he was there in time, he’d see us on the road and he’d notice some odd goings-on afterwards. But would he have seen us crossing the field to here?’

  ‘From the Ridge Way, yes, if he was watching.’

  ‘How much would he see of the Wansdyke?’