No Birds Sang

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘He used to idolise her.’

  ‘It’s like Cain and Abel, Elspeth. She doesn’t care for the smoke from his particular sacrifice.’

  Kenworthy went up to his wife and put his hands on the cool flesh above her elbows. She was standing in her slip, her frock for the evening laid out on the bed.

  ‘We’re lucky, you and I. And yet, on balance, we’ve had less time together than the Stammers.’

  ‘It isn’t a question of luck. It’s a question of attitude, whether one’s together or apart. I’m worried for Derek and Diana, though.’

  ‘Perhaps because you’re trying to look at them through what you take to be Derek’s eyes.’

  ‘On the contrary, I’m trying to see them from Diana’s point of view.’

  ‘Unsafe.’

  ‘Like all attempts at detection.’

  He slid his arms down to her waist; but there came a gentle tap of knuckles at the door. They parted as startled as adolescents caught in an illicit moment. And then they both laughed.

  Derek was holding a type-written sheet round the door. ‘This has just come in. Thought you might like to see …’

  ‘Well, do come in, Derek, we are decent.’

  It was the summary of Darkie’s record.

  B. 1912. Store-breaking 1923, first offender, bound over; 1924 – stealing by finding – shop-breaking – 1925, birched – 1926, 27, 28. Borstal, 1929.

  ‘And we’ve had no difficulty finding Sally Hammond. She’s paraplegic. Whip-lash injury in a car accident, four years ago. She’s been in a Home Counties hospital ever since. Little hope of improvement. I suppose that’s what Emma Pascoe means by getting what she deserved.’

  ‘How horrible can you get?’

  Kenworthy glanced again at Darkie’s history.

  Royal Norfolk Regiment, 1941 – A.W. O.L. Various Glasshouses: Colchester, Sowerby Bridge, Aldershot. 1943, theft of W. D. property, viz one leather jerkin. Holland, 1944, looting. Discharged, 1947. Breaking and entering, 1948, eighteen months. 1950 four years for resisting arrest and grievous bodily harm – broke policeman’s arm with the leg of a chair.

  ‘Hardly a bird of Milner’s feather,’ Kenworthy said. And he remembered, ironically, old Emma Pascoe’s plea.

  He’s always been good to me, has Darkie—kinder than the other two.

  ‘Don’t let it spoil your appetite,’ Stammers said. ‘There are certain aromas rising from the kitchen. I fancy Diana has excelled herself.’

  Seven years, 1953. Seven years, 1959. Suspected person charge, 1965.

  ‘That’s the one that got under Emma Pascoe’s skin.’

  But who was to blame Stammers and his minions if they’d been a bit ferocious? Life, limb and property on the Norfolk-Suffolk border were safer, by and large, when Darkie Pascoe was away. That was a state of affairs that Derek was paid his salary to maintain.

  Pascoe’s last sentence had been a ten-year stretch in 1967. He seemed to have got himself a chore in the wake of some managerial mob—fall guy, obviously. They’d done a wages snatch and left him behind, stunned by a security guard’s club. So, with normal remission, he’d just come out. To catch turkeys.

  ‘Drinks in five minutes,’ Derek said, beginning to slide out of the room.

  ‘I’ll tell you what. I’d like a note of all Milner’s dates.’

  ‘After supper, surely. But first things first, Simon.’

  Carbonnades à la Flamande. Diana certainly knew what she was about. And a dry Burgundy. Derek had irritating trouble, trying to open the bottle with an instrument too twee and flimsy for the job. He had to filter out bits of cork through a coffee-strainer, which exasperated Di.

  But she behaved very well at table; even managed a certain charm as if it were not costing her an effort. (Though, Kenworthy thought to himself, no one would ever recognise how much of the required effort was actually being put in by Elspeth.)

  After the meal, they polished off the washing up by communal effort. Then they settled down to play Scrabble, it having come out in small talk that both couples sometimes indulged. But here the fragility of Diana’s self-discipline began to show through again. There were family interpretations of the rules; and though each side was eager to defer to the other, Diana’s mistrust was a little too transparent: especially in the matter of two-letter words. Even when faced with the authority of the dictionary, she was reluctant to believe in io as a cry of jubilation.

  Derek was called to the phone just as Elspeth was on tenterhooks with a seven-letter word and its fifty-point bonus. The receiver was in the hall, and they could hear no more than a word or two of Derek’s voice. In fact, all three of them were doing their best to appear not to be listening. But they heard him put the instrument down and dial afresh; and then the same yet again.

  A stronger woman than Diana might have rolled her eyes in comic abandon; but Diana drew her bottom lip inwards over her teeth. Derek came back, but only partly round the door.

  ‘Like to get your hat and coat, Simon? Sorry, ladies.’

  Diana flicked her rack of letters away from her, a good deal more violently than she had intended, so that they flew along the polished table-top and spilled on the floor. Elspeth went on her hands and knees to help to pick them up.

  ‘Menschel. Milner’s given them the slip. My bloke, too. And the old quack’s certain that he’ll make for you-know-where. I’ve just rung the army. They’ve nothing on for the next hour or two.’

  Kenworthy joined his brother-in-law at the hall-stand.

  ‘Are you going to be out all night?’ Diana called.

  ‘We’ll be out till we’ve finished.’

  Elspeth came out and planted a kiss on Simon’s eye-brow. ‘Take care, darling.’

  ‘I hardly think that Milner will attack us.’

  Chapter Eight

  There had been a little more rain this evening, but it was fine again now. The light from the headlamps was reflected from the puddles in a strange manner, a flimsy, transient luminescence that seemed to climb the tree trunks as their tyres hissed on the wet roads.

  ‘One thing puzzles me a little, Derek, I’d have been tempted to give Milner his head years ago, let him loose in there to see what would have happened.’

  ‘I wanted to. But I was working for a man in those days who had a marked dislike for fantasy of any kind. And the chance was only a fleeting one. Sometimes the range isn’t in use for weeks on end, but that hardly ever happened when Milner was in the offing.’

  ‘Which reminds me, Milner’s dates.’

  Derek slid his hand in the cubby-hole and passed over a note-book. ‘You’ll find them somewhere in the last few pages.’

  Kenworthy studied the notes with the help of a torch. ‘As I thought. Whenever he came here, Darkie was temporarily at liberty.’

  ‘Blast! I never thought of that.’

  ‘Why should you? If we hadn’t called on grandma this afternoon, we’d never have thought of Darkie.’

  There was another kind of reflection, even more transitory than the tenuous light from the puddles. The Forestry Commission had fixed little mirrors on stakes at intervals to try to scare the deer back from the road.

  ‘So it’s still nympholepsis, Simon? A night visit, after all that’s happened to him?’

  ‘There’s more to it. But I still say that’s where it started: an image on Milner’s consciousness, persisting through concussion and delirium: a picture in the jaws of death. A girl at a window—and something else.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘That, I hope, we’re on the brink of finding out. I think he saw something else that night. If Sally Carver was sitting half in, half out of her bedroom window, it wasn’t because she was waiting for the arrival of an aircraft that she couldn’t have known about. She may, of course, have been merely sleepless. She may be a poetically dreamy type. But it’s also possible that she might have been looking at something, or for something, that had awakened her. Something that Edward Milner saw, too.’

>   ‘Something related to the nightly comings and goings of Darkie Pascoe?’

  ‘I daren’t take it as far as that yet.’

  ‘Darkie was very active at this particular period, as he was at any time when not actually behind bars. And I’m not pretending that we know all his transgressions.’

  ‘But let’s not take it too fast, Derek. There are terrible dangers in exercising the imagination. One’s too apt to find an attractive branch halfway up that takes one’s mind off the rest of the tree. I say its conceivable, but I still have to be convinced, that Milner saw something in Yarrow Cross that was branded into his brain as indelibly and as tan-talisingly as the girl in the window. But we mustn’t blind ourselves. He might possibly have discovered something else when he came back to try to find the girl.

  ‘When Milner came back after the war he’d expect, as would any other rational being, that this area had been given back to its original occupants. He might even have trespassed unwittingly the first time. In any case, he’d come a long way and probably hadn’t much time. He sees no one about, he says “Oh! Bugger it!” and goes in for a look round. And what’s his next move?’

  ‘Straight into the local mush.’

  ‘Refusing to talk. Refusing to say what his obvious next step would be—to do what you and I did: get hold of the six-inch map, the electoral roll, contact someone else who’d lived there. How long would he beat about that bush before coming across one or other of the Pascoes? The only thing that worries me is that the Pascoes aren’t his company.’

  ‘Darkie Pascoe is the complete, the utter, the irrational recidivist. Intelligence, common sense don’t enter into it. He’s never learned fear of reprisals; he never even knows when the game is up. I’ve taken loot out of poacher’s pockets sewn in the inside of Darkie’s jacket, so weighed down he could hardly walk or breathe, and he’s expressed surprise that the stuff was there. No. Darkie wouldn’t impress Milner.’

  ‘So they must have a peculiar common cause.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  And Kenworthy quoted the old woman. ‘I said to Darkie, you have nothing to do with it, I said. It’ll bounce back on you.’

  ‘We shall know in a little while, perhaps. I’d not be happy trying to rest a case on a quote from Emma Pascoe.’

  ‘We’re not resting a case yet, are we? We’re still trying to feel our way into one.’

  Derek turned into the same lane, scarcely more than a broadened forest ride, that they had used the previous day. They were checked at the barrier by a pair of military policemen, who were clearly expecting them, and conducted to the duty office, where a captain in field service gear was reading Dick Francis at a bare metal desk, roasting parts of his body at a tinny old electric fire.

  ‘The O.C’s told me to tell you that you’ve got till precisely four a.m. As luck has it, we’ve got a new intake this evening. They’re just squaring their gear up and we propose to baptise them at dawn stand-to. Till then, it’s all yours. Want some of us to come with you?’

  ‘No, thank you. The fewer the quieter. I’m expecting some of my own chaps as reserves, but I want them strictly in the background. When they arrive, if you’d be so kind as to keep them in camp unless I call them forward by radio. This is one trespasser that I want to encourage, up to a point. That is, providing it’s safe under foot.’

  ‘How far do you propose to penetrate?’

  ‘Just to the village.’

  ‘That’s safe enough. We like to keep the general public scared, but we’re pretty careful. Our resident sappers go over the terrain after every exercise. The bit that interests you was reported clear this afternoon. Nothing lying about.’

  ‘Is it safe to take the car?’

  ‘I wouldn’t. Strictly for feet or track-layers.’ The captain looked down at their genteel shoes. ‘We can lend you rubber boots.’

  And when that transaction was complete—it involved a surprised but obliging storeman, whose headquarters was the spiritual home of a brag school—they set out through the scrub.

  At first they tried to walk carefully, the weeds and grasses swishing about their ankles, their heels and insteps chafing inside the ill-fitting gum-boots. Sound travelled over great distances; and it might not take more than one realistic scare to make Milner change his mind. But after some minutes of slow and heavy plodding, they decided to throw immediate discretion to the winds. No amount of effort was going to produce perfect silence, and it was better perhaps to press on regardless and get the essential movement over. Once they got amongst the wrecked buildings, they could enjoy as much peace and quiet as they wanted.

  So they pushed at last through the undergrowth into the heart of the old village: the old Cattle Feed hoarding, illegible in incipient moonlight, the hulk of rubble into which the lance-corporal had fired; hard to distinguish from half a dozen like it.

  They paused to get their bearings. Both men now knew the ground plan of the original Yarrow Cross pretty well by heart: the post office, the church, the inn, the vicarage. Some cottages, particularly those built from clay-lump in the local tradition, had suffered more than others, adding misshapen debris to the confusion. And everywhere not merely gorse, cow parsley and hog-weed had grown, but thickets of self-sown saplings, making nonsense of any attempt to be certain of the line of alleys, streets and pavements. Against a barn wall the old yellow disc of an A.A. place-sign was chipped and rusted: a natural target for any man with a surplus round to loose off; and it was difficult to believe that this, then, must have been an outside wall, a landmark for traffic that had come in about its lawful business from the main road.

  They looked again at the low bank where the N. C.O. had died.

  And, yes, they knew it already, but now they could see it: the house in which Milner had been spotted could indeed have been the one from which the girl had waved. Its front windows, all that was left of them, faced almost due west. A bomber lumbering and bucketing home from the Ruhr could have come skimming over this roof from behind. Milner could indeed have looked down on her.

  Nympholepsis?

  Kenworthy looked over towards the church tower. Seventeen minutes to five the hands had marked, so Milner said, as indestructible in his memory as the girl herself. And that could probably be checked against somebody’s archives. They had narrowly missed the tower, he said. It was about a hundred and fifty yards from the house. Well: that fitted in with the line of flight.

  So for how long, in seconds, had Milner had this corner of the village in his field of vision? Kenworthy tried to do a rough mental calculation but knew it was a waste of time, because the speed of the plane was guesswork. Between five and ten seconds? Nearer five than ten?

  What could Milner have observed in five seconds—with a deduction for delay in his reactions? Disturbed as he must have been by his sudden sight of the gap in the trees?

  Disturbed? Or put on his mettle, perhaps? Suddenly more perceptive than he’d ever been in his life before? Perhaps Menschel would know the answer to that one.

  Wasn’t it nearer the mark to think of it as one-tenth vision and nine-tenths prolonged hallucination?

  And what sort of basis for inference was that?

  What was the use of all this feverish speculation anyway? How could they even begin to guess at what he might have seen? They would need to see Yarrow Cross as Milner had first seen it, from the right angle, in precisely the right light of dawn, with precisely the right strands of mist.

  Kenworthy had the weird feeling that Yarrow Cross lay all about him; that it could tell them everything—and would tell them nothing. That any attempt at reconstruction was a waste of time. That it would be far easier to get Milner to tell them, better still, to sit quietly hidden whilst he showed them.

  ‘How long do you reckon it will take him to get here?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Derek said. ‘Depends on what lifts he gets, how far he has to cover on foot.’

  ‘If he’s hoping for a lift on this last stretch, he’ll be a
long time. We didn’t pass a car. How long has he been on the road?’

  ‘First missed at 8.10.’

  ‘He’ll be lucky to get here by four. It would be just like him to come blundering through the dawn barrage.’

  ‘On the other hand, he could be here any minute.’

  ‘I hope not, because I want to have another quick look at the surrounds. After that, I suggest we retire to close cover and just wait.’

  They passed the light of their torches over the interior of the Carvers’ cottage. But it told them nothing. It couldn’t tell them anything. Nothing had changed since their visit yesterday morning. How could anything have changed? Rubble, plaster, rotting laths, and a sudden scurrying where some rodent was scavenging amongst the rubbish.

  Outside the cottage, along its northern wall, there was a comparatively clear space—comparatively clear, that is, of solid debris, or the visible lines of any wall. But they had not penetrated far through its particularly wiry tangle of weeds before they came upon a small area of broken and uneven flag-stones that had once obviously been someone’s yard.

  And in the same movement each man laid his hand on the other’s cuff.

  ‘Steady, Derek!’

  ‘Watch it, Simon!’

  Lying in front of them, standing out starkly in its shadow under their torch-light, on a patch of stone that had been cleared as if to display a museum exhibit, there lay the small pineapple outline of a hand grenade, the old Mills 36, that had served the infantry in two world wars.

  ‘And they told us the place was cleared this afternoon.’

  ‘Do you know much about these things, Derek?’

  ‘Enough to leave them alone.’

  ‘I remember them from my rookie days. I suppose it was thrown from the prairie out there, and hasn’t gone off.’

  The ring and the split pin were missing. So was the clip-handle that they held down. The notched end of the plunger, a little silver glint, protruded from the upper end of the bomb.

  ‘I remember that happened once when I was under training. Either the spring’s broken, or there’s some obstruction in the sleeve—a bit of mud or grit that’s prevented detonation. When it happened to us, an old sweat sergeant with brass buttons on his service-dress had to get down behind sandbags and pot at it with a rifle. He got it first time, but I never heard language like his in my life.’