Operation Pax

by Michael Innes

  It trembled now so that the Douglas left a wavy track behind it. The wash of fear that had swept over him in the bank and robbed him of three pounds ten was mounting, and as it mounted was meeting some strange new chemistry full of menace. He could no longer think about the number of minutes it would take for the police to begin inquiries there behind him.

  Routh swerved at the side of the road and came jolting to a stop. There was now no dissociated part of him to control the machine. His eyes were misted with tears in which his anger, his resentment, his enormous self-pity welled up and out. That he should have been baulked of three pounds ten was a wrong deeper than any plummet of his mind could sound. At the same time it was a deprivation so squalidly insignificant that the spectacle of his own helpless anger at it was unbearable. The tears released by the sorry conflict had no power to assuage, afforded no relief to the weedy figure astride the old Douglas by the roadside. That figure in its pinched and manikin stature, was too vividly before him. It seared his vanity. To banish it, to vindicate in himself the generous inches that all the world had conspired to deny: this was the claimant need of his whole being… He looked ahead up the empty road and saw the figure of a woman.

  She had overtaken and passed him regardless – a girl in breeches and leggings whom one would have taken at first for a boy. She was whistling. And her whistling picked out, as with a sudden strong accent, the stillness and loneliness of the place. As he looked, the woman turned to her left and disappeared down a lane. It could be distinguished as winding between high hedged banks to a hamlet nearly two miles away. Even more than this stretch of unfrequented secondary road, it seemed a place of solitude and secrecy. Routh slipped from the saddle and pushed the Douglas behind a nearby thorn.

  He turned by the sign post. It pointed to a place with a queer name – Milton Porcorum. He followed the whistling woman rapidly, exalted by the fierce purity of his intention. Beside him walked another Routh, a new and triumphant externalization, Routh gigantic and terrible. Routh the destroyer. He was ahead. Through this gap, as she came up with it, he would spring.

  In fact, he slithered. It was less effective. But the woman pulled up, startled. She was older than he had thought – about thirty, with pale blue eyes and a thin, firm mouth. She was suddenly quite still. Routh gave a queer cry. At his first grab she quivered. At his second she vanished. The woman vanished and as she did so agonizing pain shot up Routh’s left arm. It was such pain that his knees crumpled beneath him. He was kneeling in mud and his head was going down into mud. He struggled and the pain sickened him.

  ‘Rub your nose in it.’

  The voice of the woman from behind and above him carried to him inexorably his preposterous fortune. He put his face in the mud and moved it about feebly.

  ‘And now in a bit of gravel.’

  Throbbing to quickened pain Routh was kneed and twitched across the lane. Again his face went down.

  ‘Rub it harder.’

  The voice, mocking and excited, ended in a low laugh. Constrained by his agony, Routh did what he was told. He felt the skin of his nose and cheek go raw. He heard a quick controlled intake of breath, sensed skilled hands passing swiftly to a new hold, felt the earth drop away from him and swing back with shattering force low in the belly. For a long time he lay semi-conscious and helpless, deeper beneath his nausea than ever child sunk powerless in a chill brown pool. Through his ears passed waves of uncertain sound. It might have been the distant voices of street Arabs jeering at an abject small boy.

  4

  When at length Routh got to his feet it was early afternoon. His left arm was numb and his face felt bruised and scarified. He fingered over it tenderly with his right hand. His mind was an unfamiliar chaos. Staggering up the lane, he fumbled for a pocket mirror, and had to empty his pocket of slivers of glass. Into one of these, held up in a trembling hand, he peered apprehensively. At a first glimpse he felt a surge of mortified vanity, a fierce resentment. This was an outrage. He had been brutally assaulted. And not as in a clean row in a pub. There had been something dirty in it. What good were the police if they couldn’t keep people like that behind bars?

  For a moment longer Routh stood halted in the lane, his disordered body swaying slightly as he manoeuvred the now tiny scrap of glass before his face. The damage in point of fact was inconsiderable, for his subjection had been after all chiefly symbolical. Under the mud it looked like three long scratches and one raw patch over a cheekbone. He felt a flicker of returning conceit. Wily Routh. He hadn’t rubbed his face in the gravel half as hard as he’d intended. There was some salve to injured vanity in that. But he needed water.

  He realized that he was moving in the wrong direction. The two-stroke was up the lane, behind him. He was following the path that the woman must have continued on. He stopped, scared. She might come again and take him and twist him about. But something told him that the apprehension was unreal. He would not see her again. He went on, remembering that earlier he had passed no water for miles, and guessing that in a very little valley into which the lane presently dipped there would be a stream or spring.

  He had come upon a high wall. Blank and curving, it followed the line of a concealed lane with which his own had now merged. It was no more than the sort of wall which, running perhaps for miles round a gentleman’s park, speaks in the simplest picture language of a vanished social order. The great house within would long since have been sold for a fraction of what it would now cost to build this massive outwork. And it would shelter a private sanatorium, an establishment for training bank clerks, an approved school. In all this there was no reason why Routh should feel himself in the presence of something indefinably sinister. Only the wall was very blank and surprisingly high.

  And then Routh saw the man.

  The appearance of this human figure, sudden and unaccountable, suggested a coup de théâtre for which the wall’s sinister air had been a build-up deliberately achieved. At one moment the wall stretched unbroken before Routh, every foot of its well-appointed surface void in the bleak and shadowless sunlight. And at the next moment the man was there, an immobile and waiting figure some seventy yards away, with the unbroken stone behind him like a backcloth.

  Routh’s impulse was to turn and retrace his steps – to get back, muddy as he was, to the two-stroke, and chance finding water for a clean-up later on. His legs, however, carried him unsteadily and inexorably forward. The man made a very slight movement and a wisp of smoke floated upwards. He was smoking a cigarette as he waited. His immobility was hypnotizing. Against the clamour of his every nerve, Routh found himself quickening his pace.

  The man was standing in front of an iron-sheathed, stone-coloured door set flush in the wall. His eyes took one sweeping glance up and down the lane and then settled themselves upon Routh. Tall and with square shoulders carried high as if in a frozen shrug, he was dressed in what Routh knew to be a high-class tailor’s job in home-spun tweed. You could tell he owned whatever lay beyond that wall. But you could tell, too, that he was a townsman. His features were irregular and ugly, but they had the controlled mobility that tells of a mind schooled to work swiftly through complex issues. He belongs, Routh thought, at the top of one of the big-money professions – a leading surgeon, perhaps, or a successful KC Boss class. And a gentleman.

  Well, that’s what you are – see? Routh – muddy, dusty, torn, scratched, and with the toes hurting in his thin, pointed shoes – Routh braced himself to fill out the role. A gentleman taking an afternoon stroll in unfamiliar country. That was the formula. And better pass the time of day. Good afternoon.

  The man made no reply. In his silence the uncertain flame of confidence that had leapt up in Routh flickered and went out. The man was looking at him steadily. He was putting two and two together about the shabby figure now sliding past with averted eyes. But at least, Routh told himself, you are past. He isn’t really interested. Just keep on steadily. Only you’d better get back to the two-stroke another way.
/>   ‘Come here.’

  The words, quietly spoken behind him, had, in his already shaken state, the effect of a needle thrust into his spine. He knew that his only safety was to run, and chance making a race for it. But for the second time that day his legs were powerless, and nothing would race but his own heart. Oddly the world pivoted on him as he stood, and he found himself confronting the man who waited before the stone-coloured door.

  The man beckoned, without again speaking. He beckoned, strangely, with a downward pointing figure – as one in a circus ring might beckon at a cowed and uniformly obedient brute creation.

  Resentment rendered Routh articulate. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘ – what do you think I am?’

  But his legs were carrying him back to the waiting man. The feeble truculence he had heard in his own voice gave him no encouragement to rebel.

  ‘I think you are the ruffian who has attacked a girl in my employment.’ The man was well over six feet, and he contrived to look down at Routh as at a cur. ‘I suppose you know the sentence you’d get for a criminal assault of that sort?’

  ‘She did it. She assaulted me.’ Routh panted as he spoke. The absurdity and indignity of his words were only emphasized by the element of truth in them.

  ‘Where do you come from? What are you?’

  Routh took a quick, desperate glance about him. Somehow he had the impression that this scene was being watched, that the tip of his senses, whether of sight or hearing, had detected some presence that might succour him. But nothing he could now see gave any support to this fancy. So he must face it out. At least these were a sort of question that he could always answer after a fashion, and he judged it well to do so now. ‘I’m a clerk, and out of work. I’ve come down from the north.’

  ‘Do you think you’re likely to get work in the heart of the country?’

  ‘I’m going through to Reading.’

  ‘Motor bicycle?’

  Routh blinked. Very faintly, as if some hatch had been opened deep down in his mind, cunning stirred beneath his rage and terror. There was something queer in the way that, underneath, the brute was interested in him. He resolved in a flash that he must at all costs conceal the existence of the Douglas. He plunged at it boldly. ‘I’m walking. I’ve hardly any money left.’

  ‘And no possessions?’

  ‘A chap took my suitcase on a lorry. I’ll pick it up at the station.’

  ‘Let me see your identity card.’

  ‘It’s in the suitcase. And you haven’t any right–’

  For the first time the tall man faintly smiled. ‘A deserter on the run – eh? Your people help you at all?’

  He was softening. Hard luck. Let the poor devil off. Give him a hand. A square meal and ten bob. It was a stage in the well-to-do man’s triumphant detection of petty crime that was familiar to Routh. Automatically he played up to it. ‘I haven’t any people. I’m an only child. My father’s in a mental hospital and won’t ever get better. My mother’s gone to New Zealand with another man. I haven’t heard from her for five years.’

  Routh became aware that the tall man, whose hand should now be going to his pocket, was once more swiftly glancing up and down the lane, as if he too had a momentary sensation of being watched. Then the man’s eyes met his. Fear leapt anew in Routh. There was something queer about him. That he was softening was dead off the scent. On the contrary, there was some hard design in him. And it was only for a second that Routh thought he understood it. No, the man was looking at him simply as a carpenter might look at a plank which he would presently give himself the satisfaction of sawing into sections in the pursuance of some clearly apprehended design.

  But even as Routh grasped this, the man’s manner changed. Expression had come into his face. It was an expression of weighed or judicial contempt – a sort of judgement that had been impassively deferred until Routh in all his seediness, weediness and cowardice had been bared before him. He took a step forward and made a movement that Routh momentarily interpreted as the prelude to an iron handshake. Instead, he slapped Routh’s face, paused, slapped it again backhanded. ‘I don’t know about your father being a lunatic,’ he said, ‘but I certainly believe that your mother–’

  Routh sprang at him, screaming – groped for him through a red haze in which the external world had suddenly bathed itself. When he came to he was on the other side of the wall.

  5

  ‘I apologize.’

  At first the words seemed to come to Routh from very far away. There was a burning sensation in his throat that ran deep down into his body. The words repeated themselves and the tall man swam into focus. He was standing over Routh with a brandy flask in his hand, and looking down at him with an appearance of whimsical benevolence. He screwed the top on the flask and thrust it away in a hip pocket. ‘A bit of a test,’ he said. ‘Don’t take it hard, my good fellow. Something of a test – no more.’

  Routh, helpless on the grass, wished that he had a revolver or a knife. But hatred and the brandy now coursing in him sharpened his faculties and he realized that he had a weapon. Trapped on the wrong side of that formidable wall – it was now a shadowed concavity towering above him and stretching around him – he felt obscurely and paradoxically in control – in control of a situation that as yet he didn’t remotely understand. He had only to lie low, and never let his cunning sleep, and he would come out of this on top. He sat up. ‘You can’t do this to me,’ he said, and his voice was shaky by necessity and plaintive by design. ‘I don’t care who you are. You can be gaoled for this.’

  ‘Then it looks as if we are about quits, my friend.’ The tall man laughed shortly and produced a cigarette case. ‘Smoke?’

  Routh, although himself shaking like a leaf, observed with exultation a tremor in the tall man’s hand. His irrational conviction grew that in the unknown game that had been violently forced upon him he would himself be a winner and take all. He had concealed the existence of the two-stroke, and to this for some reason he attached a vast importance. Then – mysteriously – the enclosing wall exhilarated him. He had got inside what hitherto he had always been kept outside of – the world where both honest man and knaves had large views and big chances. Yes that was it. For good or ill he had left the world of seventy-bob swindles behind him. No need whatever for a deposit to secure delivery. He would never say that again… Routh laughed aloud.

  The tall man was startled. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked sharply. ‘Want more brandy?’

  Routh shook his head. He mustn’t do anything unpredictable like that again. But his confidence took another leap. If only ever so faintly, his captor was unsure of himself. He was uncertain, standing there like an arrogant lout over a whipped cur, that he hadn’t been precipitate, that he hadn’t acted out of turn, in grabbing Routh as he had done. This uncertainty was tremendously important – but tremendously important too was the necessity that it shouldn’t be let grow. Routh must be no more than the worthless and pliable lump of clay that the brute designed him for. The one thing that Routh must desperately conceal was any potentiality in himself for making a move or springing a surprise.

  The tall man was holding out a match. Routh, swaying, managed to get his cigarette drawing. ‘What do you mean – a test?’ he demanded.

  ‘I think I can put you on rather a good thing.’ The tall man now smiled easily. And he took without a trace of hesitation the transition from country gentleman and outraged moralist to a world of evidently shady proposals and dubious confederacies. ‘Only it needs guts. I don’t mean that it’s particularly risky – nothing of the sort – but it does need a man. I liked the way you came at me. It was damned plucky.’ He paused. ‘There’s big money in what I’m thinking of.’

  Routh felt his always facile resentment stir in him. He had evidently been graded as of very low intelligence indeed. And yet it had been a test. But of what? Whatever had flung him at this swine out in the lane, it hadn’t been anything deserving a certificate for pluck. ‘Big
money?’ he said – and managed to get quickened interest into his voice. He was certain that if there was indeed a gold mine in his present situation he himself would have to do all the digging. He remembered that at the moment his note was weak querulousness. ‘And look here,’ he added, ‘who are you anyway?’

  ‘You can call me Squire. And now, come along. We’ll get up to the house.’

  Routh got painfully to his feet. He began moving by the tall man’s side. ‘How do you mean?’ he asked. ‘Mr Squire? Or just Squire – of all this?’ And Routh waved his hand at the park through which they were walking.

  The tall man looked down at him slantwise. ‘Whichever you please,’ he said.

  Routh bit his lip. The brute couldn’t mask his contempt for a couple of minutes on end. It came into his head that he was going to be in some way enslaved, cast into thrall. Or that he was going to be killed. Very conceivably he was going to be killed in order to supply a body for, say, some insurance swindle. Routh’s eyes widened on these conceptions as he walked, and his breath came faster than need be, considering the easy pace which his companion set. But still his mysterious and unaccustomed confidence failed to desert him. It was about him like a borrowed garment, unexpectedly bestowed and of surprisingly good fit.

  He puzzled over the kind of racket that could support such wealth as he had stumbled upon. The park was large and there were deer in it. To encounter such creatures outside the zoo was, in Routh’s mind, to be on the fringes of a magnificence positively ducal, and he stared in wonder at the creatures as he walked. He noted that Squire too watched the deer, but with a glance in which there was something faintly enigmatical – something of purely practical reference. No doubt – Routh thought – he eats them. No doubt he’s deciding which to cut the throat of and get his teeth into next… And then it came to Routh that the manner in which Squire looked at the deer was precisely the manner in which he looked at him. For a moment his confidence dangerously flickered.